The singer Linda Ronstadt crowned as one of the greatest: “One of the dearest people ever to me”
The bar for great singing was always going to mean more coming from Linda Ronstadt than anyone else in rock and roll.
There may have been moments that hit harder in the country rock sphere, but when you look at the raw data and the sheer amount of hits that she had during her run, she knew how to make the songs that people wanted to hear in whatever genre she touched. But even for someone with a voice that beautiful, Ronstadt knew that there were more than a few vocalists who could manage to out-sing her on any day of the week.
Then again, that’s not hard for Ronstadt to say, given how much she has talked about her voice over the years. Since she graduated to the genre of easy listening towards the end of her career and worked with the same people who helped make some of Frank Sinatra’s biggest hits, it’s not like she was suddenly going to look back at those early records of her career and think that they are game-changing vocal performances. She was embarrassed half the time, but what she thought was cringey ended up changing the landscape of female singing.
There were two sides of female singing in rock and roll at the time, but whereas most artists with either in the Joni Mitchell or the Janis Joplin camp most of the time, Ronstadt was that perfect middle ground. She had that soft voice that was perfect for ballads, but there was also a lot of grit behind her delivery whenever she sang tunes like ‘You’re No Good’. And yet even when singing with bands like Trio with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris, she always figured there was someone new to learn from.
But when you find yourself working with someone like Nelson Riddle, how the hell do you manage to top that? This is the same person who helped make the best singers of the pre-rock and roll days into mainstream stars, but Ronstadt’s answer to that was always to go in a different direction. If easy listening felt stale, it was time to move on to albums of Mexican music, but when she returned to the pop market, Aaron Neville was enough to stop her in her tracks from the moment she heard him.
If you think about it, Neville was a different breed of singer than what Ronstadt was used to. There had been plenty of soulful vocalists who had come to California and even the odd rocker that she had worked with over the years, but by blending pieces of R&B and easy listening together, Neville found that sweet spot that could cut to the core of someone in only a few lines whenever he sang.
And when working on a series of duets, Ronstadt felt blessed that she was able to sing alongside him, saying, “He’s one of the dearest people ever to me. I talk to him a lot. He’s one of the great voices of pop music, I think. He’s not an R&B singer, really. He’s a Creole singer from New Orleans in every sense of the term.” The end result wasn’t rock and roll by any stretch, but that hardly mattered.
When listening to their voices blend together, they truly were unstoppable. Are there pieces of it that sound a little too sleepy? Sure, but if you compare it to what she had done with James Ingram on ‘Somewhere Out There’, this was taking the logical next step with someone who had a sound that was totally unique from anything she had ever sung before.
If anything, Ronstadt’s pairing with Neville probably did about as well for her as Allison Krauss did when working with Robert Plant in the 2000s. Ronstadt’s singing days were about to become a thing of the past in just a few years, but even in her final shows, it was more important for her to try something new than rest on her laurels and sing the same old songs every night.
