The first single released off of her Heart Like A Wheel album rocketed Linda Ronstadt straight to No. 1, and made her an overnight sensation, after only 11 years in the music business. On the way up, her backing bands included 3/5ths of the Eagles, and by the end of her career, she had succeeded in nearly every genre there was to sing, from country, to country rock, to pure rock, to R and B, to soundtracks, to old favorites.
Like most entertainers, her politics were goofy and her personal life a disaster (largely due to being Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown's main squeeze during his first disastrous two terms running Califrutopia into the ground), but musically she was an arena-filling megastar, and one of the first women to ever pull it off as a headliner in rock and roll.
Palsy has stilled her singing voice forever, and at 74 she can barely croak out speeches, but the roster of hits she racked up over twenty solid years of greats will long outlive her own frailty.
Here's one more for the road, this one from Simple Dreams, and written by up-and-comer Warren Zevon:
5 comments:
Linda also does some good stuff with Emmylou Harris, and with Emmylou and Dolly Parton.
One of these day's you'll post a selection I disagree with.
This is not that day.
I have always loved the pairing of a powerful soprano voice with a hypnotic deep bass. Her rendition of Blue Bayou is one of the best.
I'll never forgive Jerry Moonbeam for stealing Linda away from me...
Linda Ronstadt also recorded some really well-done songs in Spanish that she remembered from her childhood years in Arizona.
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