“Just blew me away”: The flamenco singer Linda Ronstadt crowned as the greatest
Linda Ronstadt didn’t want to cut herself off to simply country rock for the rest of her life.
There were far more genres for her to explore, and even if she didn’t have her bearings every single time she made a new record, she was proud to try something new rather than have to go down the same rabbit hole and make another heartbreaking ballad every time she sang. There was an entire world that she wasn’t letting herself see, and when she finally threw caution to the wind, her career started to get a whole lot more interesting than the average rock and roll crooner.
Because when you look at her work after 1980, things were already in a state of change. Mad Love was her first time covering songs by people like Elvis Costello, and while he took exception to hearing her voice on top of his tunes every now and again, it was better for her to try something and see if it worked or not. And when she started to take her singing to a new level on Broadway, it was a lot easier for her to see what the parameters were behind singing at that high a level.
So while What’s New was a good entry point into that genre with Nelson Riddle helping her through it all, a lot of her favourite music wasn’t necessarily in English. Although every other musical purist would have preferred that she keep singing songs that they could understand, that was never going to fly for Ronstadt. She had grown up listening to Mexican music, and some of her foreign-language albums are actually some of the finest music that she had ever made coming out of the 1970s.
A lot of it might not be all that distinguishable to the average rock and roll fan, but what she was doing did have its own unique flair to it. After all, she had heard a lot of flamenco music just as much as she had heard people like Frank Sinatra or The Rolling Stones back in the day, and since she had the chance to work with Mick Jagger singing ‘Tumbling Dice’, what was the harm in doing the same thing in the other direction?
And while Ronstadt did help break down the doors for a lot of people who were on the fence about Mexican music, she knew she was no match for the true classics. Maria Callas was always going to be one of the finest singers that she had ever heard, but when working in pure flamenco music, she was absolutely floored when listening to La Nina de los Peines for the first time.
Suddenly, the world seemed to have a whole lot more to offer to her, and Ronstadt felt that a lot of what she heard on those records was musical lessons before she even got up onstage, saying, “She was a flamenco singer, considered the greatest of the 20th century. My father’s sister had brought the flamenco records back from Spain, and I just remember when I was 1 or 2 years old watching that record spin around at 78 RPM and listening to those songs and they just blew me away.”
And while it’s easy to hear it when she made records like La Canciones de mi Padre, Ronstadt did have a few subtle ways of incorporating those kinds of vocalising techniques into her rock and roll songs. Heart Like A Wheel might be the epitome of what country rock sounded like, but the diction that she has when singing and the fluidity of her vocal tone all comes from the beautiful turns of phrase that she heard on records like this.
No one would have considered Ronstadt to be the face of Mexican music by any stretch, but if she could manage to get a few of her fans to give La Nina de los Peines a shot, that was more than enough. Fans didn’t really know what they wanted to hear, anyway, so it’s sometimes best to hit them with the kind of music that leaves them absolutely stunned from the minute that they start listening.
