The one genre Linda Ronstadt never connected with: “It was very hard for me”
Linda Ronstadt wasn’t the kind of artist who could be defined by one genre of music.
She had her moments where she could sing the greatest country song of all time with Eagles beside her, but that didn’t stop her from going in a million different directions once she got bored. It gets more than a little bit monotonous making the same song over and over again, and Ronstadt spent the rest of her career exploring every single piece of music that her voice could do justice to.
But it’s not like Ronstadt was exactly the greatest fan of her singing voice. In her mind, she really came to life onstage before anything else, and while there were plenty of opportunities for her to kill the competition when playing live, having a piece of music set in stone forever on vinyl was always going to be a bit of a gamble. She may have been more confident after getting proper training, but that didn’t mean that she had to look back fondly on her time in the Stone Poneys when she was still figuring out her voice.
Still, her “inexperienced” albums were some of the finest singing of anyone else in California at the time. The biggest names in rock and roll had already been pivoting towards country for the past few years, so it wasn’t out of the ordinary for Ronstadt to learn how to play old Hank Williams songs or take a swing on tunes from soon-to-be icons like Don Henley or Jackson Browne whenever she sang.
And when she had had enough of the limelight, turning towards easy listening was the best road that she could have asked for. What’s New might not have been the most popular career decision that she could have made, but even if she didn’t get the massive push on MTV that some of her contemporaries had, she was more than willing to follow her muse in everything from pop to classical to country and everything in between.
Then again, did you notice how none of those categories were necessarily rock and roll? Although Ronstadt grew up with some of the biggest rock stars of her time and even found time to perform with everyone from Mick Jagger to Neil Young in her spare time, there was always something holding her back from embracing those tunes whenever she got in front of the microphone.
She could do a lot of things with her voice, but she never felt that she was cut out to be a rock and roll singer like her colleagues, saying, “It was very hard for me, it wasn’t — Rock and roll was not my first instinct. I heard it before I was 10, I think it was on the radio when I was eight… I was born in 1946, so…. yeah, it was on the radio in 1952 or 1954, I think. There wasn’t much of it, but it was there. And there was a lot of it by 1956 when I was 10, so it was happening. But it wasn’t what influenced me the strongest.”
Granted, Ronstadt’s voice didn’t seem to have the same grit for rock and roll as everyone else did at the time. The most famous female rock and roll singer out at the time was Janis Joplin, and while both she and Ronstadt were brilliant at what they did, it made sense for Ronstadt to gravitate towards more easy listening music than trying to put the same kind of growl in her voice that she heard from the guys in her field.
Any other musician would be considered treasonous for turning their back on rock and roll, but Ronstadt wasn’t going to claim to be something that she wasn’t, either. She could still sing rock and roll when the time called for it, but when it comes to the greatest songs that fit her voice, she would have much rather left the greatest tunes to the true legends of rock.
