The two women who shaped JD Souther as a musician
JD Souther was the songwriting brains and main musical genius of the Eagles – but with that said, he would have been nothing without the women who guided him into being the rock icon he was always destined to be.
Of course, the key to every budding writer is not locking themselves away in a back room with a guitar before suddenly emerging with a hit on their hands, no matter how the slickness of Hollywood biopics like to paint it. For Souther in particular, it took years of painstakingly hard graft to finally get him in the place he needed to be as a musician, in order to crack the code of the industry and send the Eagles sailing on the way to infinite success.
Yet this was hardly a solo endeavour. Aside from his own bandmates, Souther had a crack team behind him, supporting him, and shaping every word he put down on the page. They just so happened to all be women. You see, the California rock scene was never as big as we might have been lead to believe – nowadays we have these romantic visions of the biggest stars in the world coming together like titans, but really they were just in small huddles of writers’ rooms, working with one another and having a massive influence on who they would all turn out to be.
In this respect, Souther was no different. Of course, it almost goes without saying that his relationship with Linda Ronstadt was a particularly important driver of this – amid their lives as a romantic couple in the 1970s, she also helped him to pen what would later become a selection of the Eagles’ greatest hits, as well as him returning the favour to write and produce on a number of her albums, such as Don’t Cry Now.
Reflecting back on the prolific heights of his career, it was telling that this influence stood out to Souther more than most. “I have to say, in some way, I had an emotional collaborator on some of the early ones, just because I was with Linda [Ronstadt] so much, and she has such great ears and such a good heart and also she’s brilliant. She had a really deft brain for separating the wheat from the chaff – the things that she encouraged me to finish and the things that she liked,” he mused in a previous interview.
But Ronstadt was not the sole North Star in guiding the musician along the path to rock glory, either. He cited a range of other female stars, from Joni Mitchell to Bonnie Raitt to Nicolette Larson, as also playing their own vital roles. “I love women and I listen to women,” was the way he succinctly put it. Alongside Ronstadt and the rest, however, Judy Collins was the other person whom Souther respected the most.
“Judy had a lot of effect on my writing as a writer, and Linda a lot as a musician,” he explained, thus landing on the dynamite combination that would ultimately secure his fate.
It just goes to show that, even in an industry seemingly so dominated by the testosterone bravado of men, women still are the true backbone which keeps everything together. Those tight California circles of musicians, led at the forefront by the likes of Ronstadt, evidently had an impact on Souther in more ways than one – but without them, he would never be considered a pioneer of the scene and a rock and roll icon.
