“Wonderful”: the one singer Linda Ronstadt and Glenn Frey called the greatest
It’s impossible to tell the Eagles’ story without Linda Ronstadt.
Even though Glenn Frey and Don Henley helped build the band from the ground up whenever they made their songs, parts of their entire career owe a huge debt to Ronstadt for helping them get through the door. But it helped that they all at least had the right benchmarks for what they all thought good singing was supposed to be every single time they harmonised with each other before the band officially took flight.
The biggest names at the time were all coming from the country world, but it took a while for Frey to really adjust to everything. He had come from Detroit, and even though he had a great deal of respect for bands like the Byrds, he was a rocker at heart when he started working with Ronstadt. You can definitely hear it in the way that he sings, but no one in rock and roll could have taught him to deliver a ballad the same way that he did when singing ‘Lyin’ Eyes’ and ‘Take It Easy’.
Henley’s voice might have been suited for some of the higher songs, but each of them cut their teeth by singing along to old Hank Williams tunes whenever Ronstadt got them into her band. She was a student of some of the greatest voices in the world of country music, but when talking about the best cowboy-clad musicians in the South, there are not many people who would have singled out Ray Charles first.
Charles was already one of the biggest names in rock and roll and R&B, so to hear him sing songs like ‘Georgia on My Mind’ was bound to be a change of pace. Anyone else would have thought that an R&B singer changing to country music would have been a disaster, but those are the records that Ronstadt always held onto the most whenever she looked back on her career.
The last thing that she wanted to do was be in the studio, but even when talking about the best shows that she ever played, she couldn’t pretend that Charles’s voice was absolutely beautiful on record, saying, “There are wonderful recordings, and I’m glad we have them; they’re things that I treasure – Ray Charles recordings and especially classical music.”
Adding, “But mainly I prefer a less illustrious live performance – whoever is playing at the San Francisco Opera may not be as big a star as Maria Callas, but they’re doing a really good job, and I like to see it.”
While Frey had transformed himself into a much more gritty rock and roller by the time Eagles hit it big, it wasn’t exactly a mistake that he ended up singing tunes by Charles when making his album After Hours, saying, “[‘Worried Mind’] is probably one of the only Ray Charles songs I would ever attempt to sing myself. There’s no beating Ray. It was on a country album that he did, and I always loved it.”
And, strangely enough, you can actually hear a lot of that influence in both of their careers in vastly different ways as well. Frey would always throw the more soulful tracks Henley’s way whenever they were working on tunes like ‘Wasted Time’, but even if Ronstadt could sing anything, Charles’s way of switching things up on every record did come in handy when she made records of standards like What’s New or tried her hand at singing tunes that were never going to get on the radio like her series of Spanish albums.
That’s really what some of the greatest singers of all time are about, though. People can try their hardest to sing the same way that Charles did every time he got behind the microphone, but the most important part of his career was trying to show everyone what was possible when they threw caution to the wind and followed their own muse.
