The one genre Linda Ronstadt said she should never sing
There weren’t too many genres off the table when Linda Ronstadt first started singing.
She didn’t have any kind of formal training by any stretch, but if you listen to her songs from the beginning of her career, she was just as happy to try singing a rock and roll tune or a heartbreaking ballad and make both of them work whenever she got up onstage. It wasn’t out of the question for her to work in any genre, but when she started to take lessons, she started to think about the kind of styles that worked a lot better for her voice than what she had been doing for the past few years.
As opposed to the usual rock and roll stars that seem to have one or two years where their voices are at their peak, Ronstadt was capable of going in a lot of different directions. Every member of the Eagles knew that she was something special when she started performing with them, and even if there were moments that didn’t gain as much attention as everything else, it was a lot easier for her to embody every song she was singing than having to worry about the sheet music for the song.
But when she first started to move outside her comfort zone by moving to Broadway, she was in for a little bit of a shock. She wasn’t trained in that way, and when she started to delve into new territory and think about the kind of tracks that she wanted to be recording, moving towards easy listening and even traditional Mexican music didn’t require the same kinds of musical muscles as traditional rock and roll singing.
Any singer knows that they need to sing from the diaphragm whenever they are making their hits, but when looking at the way that Ronstadt sang, it was about much more than raw technique. The timbre of her voice wasn’t all that suited to singing songs like ‘Tumbling Dice’ and when she started making some of her personal favourite performances in the 1990s, it felt like she was ready to leave rock and roll behind altogether.
After all, she had found her niche with playing Mexican music and playing country songs with the Trio, but it’s not like rock and roll was off the table completely. The Trio had done a version of Neil Young’s ‘After the Gold Rush’, so there was room for them to get the right song on the record, but Ronstadt would have been more than happy if she didn’t have to sing anything all that bluesy ever again.
She had found a much better outlet for her voice, and the blues was one of only a few genres that seemed to be off the table after stepping onto the Broadway stage, saying, “I felt I was set free to do the sounds that I’d heard growing up. And it came naturally when I started studying the singers who came before me. I found my high voice had taken up some of the muscle of my chest voice. My falsetto was stronger. I learned circular breathing. I had a whole voice! I could sing anything I wanted to after that—except the blues.”
Given what the blues had meant to her for so long, though, it makes sense why she would have wanted to keep that at bay for a while. Half of the greatest blues singers of all time got to where they were because of how passionate they were in their performances, and while Ronstadt certainly had the same power that she used to, she felt that it wouldn’t make sense for her to try and sing the spaces in between the notes when she learned to sing so precise for the last few years.
She had grown into a much different singer, but in this case, different doesn’t necessarily mean bad by any stretch. It’s unfortunate that she wasn’t going to grace us with the same kind of energy that she did when singing ‘You’re No Good’ back in the day, but it was worth it to get the kind of operatic singing that she could do later on in life.
