Stephens Article on Linda Ronstadt's career

[boblouisell12]

I thought the Stephens article was very thorough and made some interesting points. However, I disagree with two of his many comments:
First, she did make a permanent mark with her version of "What'll I do?" I've listened to every version of this song available on Youtube, ranging from Frank Sinatra and Johnny Mathis to Allison Krauss. No one evokes the meaning of this song so well. A close second might go to Allison Krauss. Second, Linda's Canciones DID replace Lori Beltran for at least one song. Some colleagues took me to dinner in Mexico City at the impressive Antigua Hacienda (a former dictator's mansion) where mariachis and other performers roam between rooms and table peddling their music. I asked some mariachis to perform Los Laureles. They conferred and replied "Linda Ronstadt, si?"

[boblouisell12]

p.s., I often go to Youtube when I'm preparing to perform a song not yet in my repertoire, comparing covers by various artists. Inevitably, I prefer Linda's interpretation to all of the others.

[the Scribe]

Where is the Stephen's article?

One reviewer in a different article (I think) said that Linda and Nelson's choices of songs on the three Riddle albums helped decide which songs from the American Songbook are more likely to "live on." There may be more Linda would have liked to record. I know she was hoping for a fourth collaborative album with Nelson but he died before it could even begin. The nice thing is he finally got a Grammy (his first I think) before he died. His arrangements are sublime probably as a result of his film scoring. As Linda said "he paints pictures with his arrangements." None better than this one which some fan did an exceptional video of:



Round Midnight and Lush Life are my top favorites from that series though there are many in second place. How lucky we are to be great fans of such a restless and talented singer. Our genre choices are unmatched compared to other artists.

[the Scribe]

Nov 19, 2016 20:46:20 GMT -5 boblouisell12 said:

I thought the Stephens article was very thorough and made some interesting points. However, I disagree with two of his many comments:
First, she did make a permanent mark with her version of "What'll I do?" I've listened to every version of this song available on Youtube, ranging from Frank Sinatra and Johnny Mathis to Allison Krauss. No one evokes the meaning of this song so well. A close second might go to Allison Krauss. Second, Linda's Canciones DID replace Lori Beltran for at least one song. Some colleagues took me to dinner in Mexico City at the impressive Antigua Hacienda (a former dictator's mansion) where mariachis and other performers roam between rooms and table peddling their music. I asked some mariachis to perform Los Laureles. They conferred and replied "Linda Ronstadt, si?"

I know Lola is the "standard" in Mexico and several reviewers on Amazon (amateurs) criticized Linda with what they thought was the ultimate cut saying if you want "real" Mariachia/Ranchera music then forget Linda and buy Lola Beltran instead. Of course that made me a bit furious. What those people don't understand is we fans are fans of Linda, fans of Linda's voice and we follow her wherever she goes because she is authentic and does her homework. Most of us are not about to start listening to Mariachi music but have come to respect it. So I listened to Lola and I have to tell you I thought Linda was much better but I am prejudiced and I do not know the language well. Still, I would have to say Linda is the standard for that genre in the USA. The Chicana Beltran as opposed to the Mexican Ronstadt (aka Lola).

I dare say that Linda's two Mexican albums are the most important thing she has done. It has saved the genre and influenced a generation as well as evoked pride in the heritage for many latin youth. That's the power of music and the power of Linda.




Look at Lola's expression at 1:40 in this video and tell me she isn't taken with Linda. Linda's dad Gilbert attended a Lola Beltran concert and Lola found out he was in the audience. Lola Beltran at one concert stops the concert and says "I would like to know if Mr Ronstadt (Linda's dad) is here?" She had this beautiful rebozo,silk shawl that she had (been wearing). She took it off and she said "Mr. Ronstadt, on behalf of all the Mexicanos please give this to your daughter. It is because of her that mariachi music is alive."

Read more: ronstadt.proboards.com/thread/673/quotes-linda-ronstadt#ixzz4QeaOHvbM

THE ORGANIZER -- JOHN RIALSON

Cesar Chavez once led a boycott of a Safeway on 1700 Alum Rock Road in San Jose. The grocery store is long gone, and in 1999 the Mexican Heritage Plaza was built in its place.

As the site's mariachi youth program coordinator, John Rialson was rewarded with a small double cubicle in the sprawling structure, which he keeps filled with clippings of all things mariachi.

Want to know about the history of the plaza? Rialson dives into a filing cabinet. Want to know the role of the flute in mariachi music? He's got an article already photocopied and stapled.

As excited as he gets about mariachi's rich past, his passion is the future -- the 400 enthusiastic kids who are learning the mariachi tradition in seven local schools. He said that a decade ago, mariachi was at most an after- school hobby.

Now it is fast becoming a regular part of local school music classes, where some kids get a grade for mariachi.

After the schools program got off the ground a few years ago, Rialson and others started a night class for community members, teaching everyone from an 80-year-old woman to kids such as Angel Mendez how to play the traditional music.

Rialson said that as mariachi music was starting to wane in Mexico in the early 1980s, it started to boom in the United States with the release of Linda Ronstadt's popular "Canciones de Mi Padre" reords.

In the same way that the "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" soundtrack released two years ago has spurred widespread interest in bluegrass, Ronstadt brought mariachi music to the masses.

"That really inspired all of the kids here, who wanted to sing like Linda," Rialson said.

Now, Rialson said, mariachi music festivals take place throughout the country.

"It kind of started down in Texas and Arizona, (but) it's really been spreading across the country," he said. "Even Detroit did one a few years ago."

And the music only has room to grow, with a baby boom of students learning by classroom instruction. Rialson said thousands of students are learning mariachi in places such as Los Angeles and Tucson, Ariz.

[ARP]

Here is a link to the Stephens article:


Der Article

[moe]

All in all a pretty good article. I can quibble with some of his quibbles-there seems to be a recurring tendency of many reviewers/critics to find SOMETHING wrong with Linda or her voice or style or -I don't know-her hairdo. It seems this tendency increases with the height of the brow of the reviewer. But there is a more than even chance that I am being overly sensitive so I'll just let it go. 

I do have to note one rather glaring if not overly significant factual error: The female lead in"Pirates" was named Mabel not Mimi. Not to be overly consumed with precision but Mimi was the female lead in "La Boheme" also performed by Linda. (I can't believe it I spelled "Boheme" right first try-there may yet be hope)

[the Scribe]

Love this sentence "Ronstadt sings in French and English, adding to her stylistic versatility and making her a kind of vocal polyglot." I find vocal polyglot extremely funny. I don't agree with everything and no one will but it is well written with lots of effort put into it. It might be a tad too intellectual (or I may be too unintellectual lol) but that's ok. It looks like there is more on Vincent's site to discover so I would encourage others to check it out. He is doing good work. Thank you for including Linda Ronstadt Vincent.

[Dianna]

I don't know about the amazon amateurs reviews Linda Vs Lola.. that is their opinion. I do know when Canciones came out my mothers cousins in Mexico raved to my mom via phone calls many times at how much they loved her and as one relative put it. ." she puts the others to shame." My mom wasn't peddling the album, they brought it to her attention.. so I don't know who "the others," were/are he referred to??
Only negative thing I have heard is what a past co worker said to me. He criticized her for not knowing the language or culture enough to make the album. his claim was (assume this was Canciones prep) he knew people who traveled with Linda to Mexico to learn the culture and language better.. but he never criticized her singing just the authenticity or motive. lol.. I told him well, Linda is part Mexican, her dad sang and spoke in spanish and english.. so she was aware of this music because she heard it all the time as a child. so it isn't fake.. it's not like she decided one day. I'm gonna sing in spanish.. what mexicans and anglos do not understand.. is when you grow up in a household where 1 parent is bilingual and the other is not. or speaks only english, chances are the kids will not speak spanish fluently and are very americanized as opposed to kids who's parents are both from Mexico. it's completely different.. Linda's spanish pronunciation is perfect because she heard her dad and his side of the family and mimicked the sounds from early on. I know this because my situation is the exact same as Linda's, except my mom is the bilingual one. we are still enriched with the culture.. we know how to make tamales. we know the slang and the pop culture. all that stuff. I just hate when people minimize it.

[erik]

Quote by Dianna:

I don't know about the amazon amateurs reviews Linda Vs Lola.. that is their opinion. I do know when Canciones came out my mothers cousins in Mexico raved to my mom via phone calls many times at how much they loved her and as one relative put it. ." she puts the others to shame." My mom wasn't peddling the album, they brought it to her attention.. so I don't know who "the others," were/are he referred to??
Only negative thing I have heard is what a past co worker said to me. He criticized her for not knowing the language or culture enough to make the album. his claim was (assume this was Canciones prep) he knew people who traveled with Linda to Mexico to learn the culture and language better.. but he never criticized her singing just the authenticity or motive. lol.. I told him well, Linda is part Mexican, her dad sang and spoke in spanish and english.. so she was aware of this music because she heard it all the time as a child. so it isn't fake.. it's not like she decided one day. I'm gonna sing in spanish.. what mexicans and anglos do not understand.. is when you grow up in a household where 1 parent is bilingual and the other is not. or speaks only english, chances are the kids will not speak spanish fluently and are very americanized as opposed to kids who's parents are both from Mexico. it's completely different.. Linda's spanish pronunciation is perfect because she heard her dad and his side of the family and mimicked the sounds from early on. I know this because my situation is the exact same as Linda's, except my mom is the bilingual one. we are still enriched with the culture.. we know how to make tamales. we know the slang and the pop culture. all that stuff. I just hate when people minimize it.

For an alternate take on Canciones De Mi Padre, on Amazon, namely mine (shameless self-promotion at work here [LOL]) that I wrote back in May 2012:

4.0 out of 5 stars Once Upon A Time In The Southwest, May 3, 2012

This review is from: Linda Ronstadt: Canciones De Mi Padre (Audio CD)

In a career that saw her upping the ante for herself every time she made an album, even during the late 1970s when critics saw her music stultifying into a "formula", however successful she was, Linda Ronstadt upped the ante just a little bit more near the end of 1987, when the full weight of her Mexican-American upbringing in Arizona was bought out on CANCIONES DE MI PADRE, an album which paid homage to her father and his Mexican background. Having spent the mid-1980s doing opera, big-band standards, making the ultra-traditional country album TRIO with her good pals Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris, and having a huge #2 hit early in 1987 with James Ingram ("Somewhere Out There"), one could have easily gotten a case of musical whiplash from all this musical eclecticism. And a lot of people in fact did.

CANCIONES, recorded with various mariachi ensembles, including Mariachi Vargas and Mariachi Los Camperos De Nati Cano, is Linda at perhaps her rawest, with all the songs being very traditional borderland rancheras and corridos that she heard as a youngster growing up in Tucson, which is after all only about an hour north of the Mexican border. With songs like "Por Un Amor", the boisterous "Y Andale" (which Linda does as a duet with her niece Mindy) and "La Charreada", and "Hay Unos Ojos", Linda is very much into her element as she was on her 1970s country-rock albums, which occasionally dropped hints of her background, as with "Lo Siento Mi Vida" and the Mexican influences of "Carmelita" and "Blue Bayou". The album definitely drips authenticity, which is something she learned in her childhood from her biggest influence, Lola Beltran, and which she has passed on to the great female singers (Emmylou; Trisha Yearwood; Tift Merritt; Caitlin Rose, etc.) who have followed her throughout the years.

Where Linda might be faulted on this album and its two successors (MAS CANCIONES; FRENESI), though, is that in sticking so slavishly to tradition, however honorable that might be, she falls victim to accusations of turning these songs that are so clearly vital to her and her life into frozen museum pieces, rather than updating them to reflect the connections between the past and the present. Also, if one isn't used to the mariachi/ranchera style of singing, as a lot aren't, one may occasionally find Linda's voice to be unusually loud; and if you're not terribly fluent in Spanish or in Mexican culture, the album itself as a whole can be a turn off. More than a few critics thought so when the album came out (Rolling Stone's critique of it was especially damning, arguably the worst review they or any publication ever gave to anything of Linda's).

Even so, CANCIONES DE MI PADRE did succeed on its own terms, and on Linda's as well, becoming the single most successful non-English album in history (an honor that it may very well still have a hold on even now), and validating, certainly in the most open-minded music listeners, the importance of a culture and ethnic group that seem to be so terribly targeted by the worst of bigots in America these days. It would have been even better had Linda done an album that mixed her Mexican, country, and rock influences together, with alternating English and Spanish-language songs; but with her retirement from performing and recording, that probably won't happen now. Still, Linda set a standard on this album. It remains a pivotal part of her time as perhaps the most influential female pop singer, Mexican-American or otherwise, of the last 50 years.

[Richard W]

I recall that when Canciones came out, the Chicago Tribune had an article in its Arts section that accused Linda of "cultural imperialism", either not knowing Linda's ethnic background or her cultural backstory. The criticism seemed to stem from the writer's irritation with Linda's rampant eclecticism, as in, now this genre-hopping SoCal country-rock star has gone too far.

Then again, it was also the Tribune that stated in a pre-concert write-up that Linda, then around 50, had finally married — a doctor.

[erik]

Quote by Richard W:

I recall that when Canciones came out, the Chicago Tribune had an article in its Arts section that accused Linda of "cultural imperialism", either not knowing Linda's ethnic background or her cultural backstory. The criticism seemed to stem from the writer's irritation with Linda's rampant eclecticism, as in, now this genre-hopping SoCal country-rock star has gone too far.

You've got to love the way some music critics sound like opportunistic politicians when using terms like "cultural imperialism". And you also have to wonder whether the guy who wrote that really didn't know about Linda's background, or did and just tried to use it against her while covering up his own prejudices. Either way, it's intellectually and musically dishonest (IMHO).

[Dianna]

there were several people who didn't believe she was Mexican. One girl make a sarcastic comment to me, "yeah Ronstadt sounds like a Mexican name." generally those are people who never followed her, and at the most were casual fans. When I was young, My aunt Teri is the one who told us that she was Mexican, as her and my uncle were huge fans. At that point, I myself didn't believe her .. until I did my own research lol

[fabtastique]

I'd never have listened to this type of music (as its not something that I was naturally exposed to) without first being introduced to it by Linda and for that I'm eternally grateful.