“I was trying to do things I admired”: The two singers who turned Linda Ronstadt onto country
If you were to ask any country star why they thought other musicians embraced the genre, you’d probably be faced with a handful of different reasons. Roots and upbringing aside, there’s a lot to be said about country’s storytelling appeal, not to mention its natural ability to get at any kind of emotion; nostalgia, longing, love, heartache. What you perhaps wouldn’t expect is for someone to say that people get into it because it’s easy. And yet, that’s precisely what Linda Ronstadt said in 1970.
Then again, it wasn’t the kind of comment that sought to disregard it. Simplicity can be seen as amateur, but, in this scenario, Ronstadt explained how it hinges on human connection, containing the kind of simplicity that hits harder. “It’s very simple and honest music,” she told Country Song Roundup. “Everybody’s trying to get some air.” Observing the world’s hardships and how psychedelia was borne out of a push for escape, Ronstadt implied that country came was a remedy, even if at that point it was hard to decipher whether it was merely a passing trend or not.
But anything so inherently connected to the American value system, especially those at the bottom of it, would never be a fad, even if its general premise would soon change, welcoming different voices that didn’t always come from working class backgrounds or look at country music as something conservative that they needed to sustain. There would always be an element of that, but the 1970s saw a more open-ended road for country, a more inclusive future-gaze that still wanted to comfort all those left by the wayside by a frayed society.
As Ronstadt said, “Music is a reflection of what’s going on in people’s heads. Obviously we screwed it up here pretty badly. They’re trying to seek shelter in any way they can. Music is just an imitation of that.”
A reflection shared by many, including Nina Simone and her famous quip about an artist’s duty being to reflect the times, imitating cultural hardships was the perfect through line for country, and especially for musicians like Ronstadt, who not only became a significant voice carrying many of the genre’s traditional lamentation but something more, bringing in her Mexican heritage and an outlook that went beyond her immediate vicinity. One that looked at the world and wished it had more tenderness.
Of course, a lot of this was achieved by reflecting those she already loved, the artists who already had a grip on her heart, who showed her what it sounded like to sing, or what it looked like to become the stories you performed. Many of these artists had already exposed themselves to Ronstadt before she was age ten (a rule she sticks by: never try to do anything she hadn’t heard before she was ten), but country was something she only really felt connected to after discovering the two people who would form bonds kindred enough to name a collaborative album Trio: Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris.
In Ronstadt’s eyes, these two were the key to understanding what it was all about: “All I did was try to do things I admired,” she told Mix in 2000. “Of course, they didn’t come out sounding anything like that, but that was me. People don’t realise how much George Jones copied Hank Williams, or how much Ray Charles copied Nat Cole when they were starting out. I tried to copy anything I heard – Judy Collins or Bill Monroe.”
On country, she added: “I didn’t care much for female country singers ’til Dolly Parton and Emmy, ’cause they just sound so twangy. So I always tried to sing like the men. And I wound up sounding twangy anyway.” Funnily enough, she also admitted that she later “analysed” why the three of their voices worked so well together, saying Parton had “a real horn-like quality on the top” which matched well against her “thicker and bigger” voice, like “lead on the bottom”.
But, in all honesty, it was far more than just that. Beyond how beautifully their voices blended, it was also about how much that kind of traditional country simplicity made it all work without sounding too much like a relic of the past, or too much like there wasn’t anything there other than the obvious beauty of three well-established female voices. There was also something deeper that sounded a lot like the world at that particular juncture, a lot like ‘Wildflowers’, which tackles the urge to break out, not caring about where that might be or what that might look like.
As Parton’s lyrics suggest: “When a flower grows wild, it can always survive / Wildflowers don’t care where they grow.”
