The two singers Linda Ronstadt thinks everyone should bow down to: “I tried to do what they did”
If there’s one thing Linda Ronstadt will always be forthcoming about, it’s how women were treated in the industry when she rose to fame.
“We are dealing entirely with men. I find a lot of resentment from musicians at times,” she once said. “If they’re behind me, it’s a threat to their masculinity.”
This is something countless others have shared, too, from Stevie Nicks to Debbie Harry – most of the time, it was navigating an industry where guidance from other women felt entirely restricted, or what Patti Smith once alluded to when she said that there was a process for every woman becoming a rock star where you’d have to effectively unlearn how you’d been conditioned from an early age.
“When I grew up in the early ’60s, girls were supposed to be mothers, secretaries, maybe hairdressers,” she told The Guardian. “Even in the early ’70s, when I started playing rock and roll, there weren’t a lot of girls taking an aggressive stance, playing feedback, you know. I had trouble recruiting guitarists to play with me. They’d come in, see it was with a girl, and just leave.”
Unlike many of their male counterparts, it wasn’t that there was a disparity with female talent – it was that they were immediately set back by prejudice and expectation, already regarded as lesser-than because of unchecked bias. Remember when the Rolling Stone founder compiled seven “masters” of rock ‘n’ roll, though he excluded women and Black people because they aren’t on the same “intellectual level” as their white peers?
And that’s someone who supposedly has an in-depth knowledge about music history and the fact that most of our pivotal turning points in the field were sparked by Black communities, like jazz and soul, or female songwriters, like the folk and singer-songwriter booms. So, for pioneers like Ronstadt, being privy to the scene and observing it in a way that improved art without preconception meant tipping your hat to those who actually changed the game forever.
Like, for instance, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. According to Ronstadt, these are the two singers “all girl singers have to curtsy to”. Holiday, in particular, just got it in a way that Ronstadt did, especially when it came to the feeling of music and where, precisely, that came from. Like Nina Simone, Holiday believed jazz was the root of everything, saying it captured the one thing that carried through the ages with musical excellence: “It’s good music and a good feeling.”
But she also understood that it was instinctive (“you just have to have it in you”), and something built on both the simplicity of spontaneity and the complexity of interpersonal dynamics and nuance. This was reflected in her own music and the atmosphere she brought on stage, and the influences of her past curled around her aura like a fleeting cloud of smoke that enhanced her appeal without weighing it down because Holiday was never a heady presence, despite the various perils of her artistic journey.
But Holiday didn’t just reinterpret that energy, Ronstadt argues. She invented something new, and Ronstadt tried to imitate a lot of what she did in her own music to try to recapture some of that quintessential magic. Paying her an endorsement others could merely dream of, she concluded, “[Holiday] invented pop music and the things we all later did. She made music so intimate. She and Frank Sinatra are the two biggest influences on popular singing in the 20th century. I tried to do what they did.”
