Why did Linda Ronstadt retire from music?
While her career was characterised by a string of successful singles and albums in the 1970s, Linda Ronstadt’s accomplishments exist far beyond the span of just a single decade.
Having started her career in the 1960s, she started out and gained a reasonable amount of attention for her work with the folk outfit, Stone Poneys. While the band were short-lived and didn’t manage to reach the heights that many had expected them to, they’re frequently looked back upon as a great example of her talents as a vocalist, and provided her with the starting block for where she would end up.
However, given the difficulty that they had in finding their way to the top end of the charts, or at least in maintaining a decent level of acclaim, it’s understandable why Ronstadt would look back on this era of her career as something she’s not exactly proud of, and far from what she wanted to be achieving.
She’d eventually find herself travelling down a path of performing covers, and during the 1970s, would find herself having huge hits with them. Her versions of pop standards like ‘You’re No Good’, ‘When Will I Be Loved’ and ‘Blue Bayou’ made a significant impression on the charts, with all of them reaching the top five not just in the US, but in multiple countries around the world.
While the fruits of her solo career began to show themselves less frequently during the 1980s, she would then go on to collaborate with two other renowned vocalists, forming the country-pop supergroup Trio alongside Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris. This gave Ronstadt a career boost once again and shone a light on her talents to another generation of listeners, but after this brief period of working alongside two other icons, things slowly began to come to an end.
After a number of years where the frequency of her output began to dwindle, she gradually came to a standstill and eventually announced that she had made the decision to retire from music altogether in 2011. However, many people have wondered exactly why someone with such a gift would choose to walk away from the spotlight, especially given that she’d fought her way back into it on so many occasions throughout her career.
So, why did Linda Ronstadt retire from releasing music?
It was in 2000 that Ronstadt, who was still working at a reasonable rate at this time, noticed a change in her voice, and her output would slowly begin to decline in frequency from this point onwards. Her final solo album, Hummin’ to Myself, arrived four years later, with the collaborative album, Adieu False Heart, which she worked on with Ann Savoy, coming in 2006, before her final performance in 2009.
Ronstadt didn’t actually announce her retirement until 2011, however, and she would reveal that she’d taken this difficult decision as a result of a condition that she’d been keeping private. While she was initially diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, it was later ruled as a case of progressive supranuclear palsy that had caused her voice to deteriorate, and rather than risk causing further damage, she opted to take the brave decision to stop releasing music for the sake of her health.
It may have marked a sad end to an illustrious career, but it’s one that she can look back on with pride. Knowing that she’d managed to overcome so many periods of uncertainty by fighting her way back into the spotlight only goes to show just how much of a courageous spirit Ronstadt has always been, and how important to the history of pop music her voice is.
