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‘Mexican Music Gave Me a Whole Voice’: Linda Ronstadt Looks Back on the Album of Her LifeLong before “You’re No Good” and “Blue Bayou” made her a household name, Linda Ronstadt was belting out música mexicana classics with her family. The rock legend explains why 1987’s Canciones de Mi Padre became what she thinks is the most important album in her storied career.Sept. 20, 2022
In spite of the dreary haze that often descends upon the corners and curves of the quiet San Francisco neighborhood it sits in, Linda Ronstadt’s home is a bright little respite, holding its luster even when wrapped in fog. The bones of the place are strong and classic, elegant without trying too hard, with broad windows washing the first floor and creamy walls in the ambient glow of a gloomy afternoon.
The aesthetic is a stark contrast to what used to be her ideal working environment. “I don’t like to have windows in the studio; I’m happy to have the walls blank,” Ronstadt, 76, says from the cozy confines of her living room. She officially retired in 2009 following her diagnosis of progressive supranuclear palsy, a neurodegenerative disorder similar to Parkinson’s disease, but Ronstadt—who released her debut studio album, Hand Sown…Home Grown, in 1969, and has put out more than two dozen others since—can easily recall the dark, spare walls of the recording booths she frequented over the course of her five-decade career. Her signature hairstyle—cascading raven layers and bangs which many have imitated but few have achieved—has aged into a platinum bob, with a few glittery highlights woven throughout her silvery strands. “Where I live, I have to have windows everywhere,” she says. “I have to have lots of light, and I love to have things to look out at.”
Ronstadt spends most of her days at home now due to the discomforts of her illness, and here she is surrounded by reminders of the people she holds dear -— talismans of a life well lived, and well loved. Mementos from her travels, family photos, and paintings by her children warm up the walls and smile up from the piano. Numerous images of the Virgen de Guadelupe, the patron saint of Mexico, hang throughout the home, but the most vibrant one sits in a place of honor above the fireplace.
A snapshot of her rollerskating down the boardwalk in Venice with a friend—in skates similar to the ones she famously wore on the cover of her 1978 album, Living in the USA—peers out from a crowded bookshelf. Ronstadt has amassed an impressive collection of awards, 11 Grammys and a National Medal of Arts among them, but they’re not on display here, or anywhere else in the house—partly because the windows don’t allow for a ton of hanging space, but mostly because she doesn’t know where they are.
“I lost them!” she says. (The presidential medal, given to her by Barack Obama, is safely stored under her bed.) “I want to hang stuff like that. I’m really bad about keeping stuff. I let everything go.”
Ronstadt has lived in many cities, though she’s always made her homes in the west. She was born in Tucson, Arizona; chased her musical dreams to Los Angeles after high school in the late ’60s; and laid down roots in Northern California and in Tucson, where she raised her son, Carlos, and daughter, Mary, before settling her family in San Francisco. She has downsized over the years, with closets and storage space decreasing every time she’s moved house. The main drawback is that there’s nowhere to keep the prizes, souvenirs, and notable outfits she collected through the four decades she spent on the road, in the studio, and onstage as one of the most adored performers of the 20th century.
One ensemble—a black and white charro, the impeccably embroidered suit of a mariachi—stands out, though it’s since been sold or given away. She wore the charro while touring in support of 1987’s Canciones de Mi Padre, her decorated and critically adored album of música mexicana standards that she considers “without a doubt” to be the biggest—and most fulfilling—gamble of her career.
Though it seems like a hard pivot from the ’70s rock and pop singles that made her a household name, Canciones de Mi Padre was an endgame of sorts: The choices she made in the ’80s that made it possible for her to take such a risk, and with the support of her record label, were enabled by the successful run in the ’70s. The slow-burning wrath of 1974’s “You’re No Good,” her first No. 1; 1977’s dreamy, lilting “Blue Bayou”; the honky-tonk twang of “Poor Poor Pitiful Me” and defiant sass of “When Will I Be Loved” -— these were the enduring rock ’n’ roll standards that landed her on the cover of Rolling Stone and fueled her rise, unimpeachable classics that reaped generations of fans in the following decades. Yet in spite of its definitive popularity, her ’70s output is not what she’d consider to be her best material —- or material she even likes.
“The first decade, I was trying to learn how to sing,” she explains. “Up until 1980, I was just walking into walls. I never listen to my records, but I still sing in my head. Sometimes I can’t remember the words, so I’ll check out a track to see what the words are, and I just go, ‘What was I thinking?!’” She laughs. “I think that my early records were just eclectic mania. Me playing the guitar, badly, and a rock ’n’ roll song, like ‘You’re No Good’—I mean, they didn’t make any sense. I’d like a song, and I recorded it, but I don’t know that it was essentially me.”
Canciones de Mi Padre is the one exception to the rule. Her first música mexicana album was a definitive smash she not only liked, but loved: By following her gut, pursuing her passion in spite of skeptical label brass, and making an album anchored in her most treasured family memories, Ronstadt not only celebrated her Mexican roots with great success—as proven by the 2 million copies it’s sold since its release—but introduced millions of listeners to the songs that made her fall in love with music in the first place. “Rock ’n’ roll comes from blues and I didn’t,” she says. “I came from Mexican music. The foundation of my sound is really, truly Mexican music.”
In 1987, Ronstadt rolled the dice when she told her record label that she intended to record an album of Mexican folk standards—a project she had been laying the groundwork for since childhood. Her mother, Ruth, hailed from Michigan, and the family of her father, Gilbert Ronstadt, emigrated from Germany and settled in Sonora, Mexico, in the 1840s. The soundtrack of her childhood home in Tucson reflected her mother’s adoration of the Great American Songbook and her father’s heritage: a balanced mix of opera, jazz-age favorites, and the mariachi, norteño, and ranchera classics embraced by her Mexican family, both her local cousins and those in Mexico City. “I had family living down there for a long time, and they lived on the other side of the wall from Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo,” she says. “They had a bunch of their paintings when I was a kid. They were just the neighbor’s paintings, you know? It was in the ’30s. Nobody knew that stuff was going to be valuable. But they used to climb up on the wall and look at her blue house.”
When she wasn’t learning to harmonize alongside her father, who also strummed his guitar, and her siblings, she’d study Georges Bizet’s Carmen, flipping the 78 record countless times to hear the leading mezzo-soprano’s famous “Habanera,” as well as the music of Cole Porter, George Gershwin, and Gilbert & Sullivan on the radio. Since her earliest interviews, she’s credited corridos and ballads as her greatest teachers, with Mexican singer Lola Beltrán’s octave-scaling belt and rich vibrato serving as a paragon for the performer she aspired to be.
“Phrasing has always been my problem,” she says. “It was always my Achilles heel. What finally set me free with phrasing was Mexican music, because the indigenous rhythms, they’re not European, and they’re not African, so you have to really figure out how to phrase. After I sang Mexican music, I was free.”
In spite of the direct line a listener could draw between Beltrán’s lung-busting vigor and the hypnotic melancholy of Ronstadt’s melody on “Blue Bayou,” the single that became her calling card, her label dismissed the thought of her temporarily shelving her rock-star status for that of an aspiring ranchera when she brought it up the first time. “I’d asked them if I could make a record in Spanish, and they rolled their eyes and said, ‘Don’t be silly,’” she remembers. “Joan Baez had made one [1974’s Gracias a la Vida (Here’s to Life)] and it hadn’t sold, so they just weren’t interested.”
One single in Spanish—“Lo Siento Mi Vida,” which she co-wrote with her longtime collaborator Kenny Edwards and her father, who helped them write the lyrics over the phone—made its way onto her 1976 album Hasten Down the Wind, and she released a Spanish version of “Blue Bayou” in 1978. That was the closest she came to realizing her dream until her instincts—and the successes they yielded—brought her several steps closer to Canciones.
To say that Ronstadt’s output in the early ’80s was diverse is an understatement: She kicked off the decade with the New Wave-channeling Mad Love and Get Closer, which features her favorite vocal performance (“The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress”). She took on a leading role in Broadway’s revival of the Gilbert & Sullivan classic The Pirates of Penzance, and later tried her hand at opera as Mimi in a production of Puccini’s La Bohème. Her pivot to a different kind of stage came with formal vocal training, which finally gave her the structure she needed to control her powerful belt.
“I always felt like a mini voice, because I was onstage with real loud instruments and it felt like I couldn’t make enough sound,” she says of the stark contrast between the demands of her stadium gigs and Saturday matinees. “When I went to Broadway and got the voice teacher, I started learning how to marry my head voice to my chest voice and find a mix. And that was difficult for me, but I had a few aha moments. I never learned how to carry it all the way to the top of my register, but I could do it for my middle.”
This shift delivered the breakthrough she’d been craving. Rock ’n’ roll wasn’t pushing her as a musician in the ways she had hoped, but Pirates—an experiment that not only gave her creative satisfaction but a Tony nomination for best actress—proved her gut was right. She continued to mine her past for inspiration, beginning with the familiar, approachable jazz standards and show tunes of Gershwin, Porter, Irving Berlin, and the other greats who filled the rooms of her childhood home with timeless melodies.
Ronstadt’s next three albums, 1983’s What’s New, 1984’s Lush Life, and 1986’s For Sentimental Reasons, gave the Rat Pack and their tux-wearing cohort a run for their money. Any voice teacher will tell you that singing pianissimo—very softly—can be far more difficult than roaring a high note while emptying your diaphragm. That was a key lesson Ronstadt took away from these recordings, and you can hear it in her ability to restrain without shedding an ounce of intensity.
The three albums of standards were critically adored and commercial successes, which gave her the latitude—and the blessings of label executives—to explore her passion projects. She teamed up with two old friends, Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris, to record Trio, the collaborative country album they’d been trying to make for years but couldn’t given their understandably demanding schedules. The transition from lounge act back to country queen was a bold one, but for Ronstadt, her jazzy repertoire and the songs she was gravitating towards had one crucial thing in common: They sounded like progress when rock felt like regression.
“American songbooks were running up and down in an elevator for years,” she says. “People thought the songs were corny. They were just so beautifully crafted. They’re incredibly sophisticated. They can work on the old, simple kind of pop level and on the deepest intellectual level. A lot of the rock ’n’ roll stuff I sang was for kids—30, you’re aged out of it—and I wanted to sing grown-up music. We wanted to sing music the women would sing. They’d been taking care of a house, and they just had time to rest and a little bit of time to get together. Their children were making demands, and they didn’t have to have their hands in the scrub board. And get together and share their feelings. I felt very strong about that.”
In spite of their distinct, immediately recognizable voices, Parton, Harris, and Ronstadt relished stripping each song down to little more than a tight harmony and the strum of an acoustic guitar—an arrangement not unlike the structure of Ronstadt’s beloved mariachi ballads. One snapshot of a studio memory stands out as a metaphor for their chemistry. “We were all sitting with our feet up on the console to take the pressure off our backs,” she says. “I looked at our footwear: Emmy was wearing cowboy boots, I was wearing some kind of French high-top sneakers, and Dolly was wearing five-inch spiked heels. I just thought, how odd that those three styles had come together and sing in harmony.”
Trio was a turning point for Ronstadt, a palate-cleanser and a redirect, in that it returned Ronstadt to her roots, and a bridge between all that she’d done and the one project she’d always wanted to do: Canciones. “I just thought, ‘I’ve sold all these records, I can do this now,’ and I made that very clear to the record company,” she remembers. “They were really against it, but to their credit, they stepped up and tried to help me sell it once it was recorded. I think it was the fact that the standards succeeded. They didn’t think I’d ever succeed with Mexican music. They just thought I was crazy. But I was glad they were wrong.”
Canciones delivers her most demanding vocal performance—her sustained belt on “Los Laureles” surely would’ve made Beltrán proud—as well as the most elaborate instrumentals to accompany her, thanks to renowned composer Rubén Fuentes and the combined might of three of the most beloved ensembles in regional Mexican music: the Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán, Mariachi Los Camperos, and Mariachi Los Galleros de Pedro Rey. An established and respected mariachi composer and performer, Fuentes served as the musical director of Canciones as well as Ronstadt’s bandleader for the project. He set about working with her—and the massive orchestra they’d assembled—to craft her versions of the songs her father and his family would sing to her back in Tucson.
“He’s considered to be the father of modern mariachi,” she says. “He knows how to do the traditional stuff really well, but he also lived in Mexico City, so he liked to do urban stuff. The stuff that I’d chosen are all songs from the Mexican countryside, and I wanted him to be very authentic and old-fashioned. He kept giving me these really modern arrangements, so I said, ‘More cows, fewer car horns.’” To transport herself during their recording sessions, she relied on unexpected visual aids that reminded her of home. “I had a couple of cows up here, living in Northern California, so I put pictures of my cow and her calf. I picked pictures of cows from magazines. I kept saying, ‘More cows! More cows!’ but I pretty soon had the wall covered with pictures of cows.” Fuentes relented. “I got him to move the arrangements a little bit.”
Somewhere between the pulse of Mexico City traffic and the majesty of the campo with Canciones, Fuentes and Ronstadt found their balance, one evident in Fuentes’ intricate arrangements, the vibrant swells of the mariachis themselves, and the intention that went into condensing centuries of tradition into one thoughtful collection. Canciones is an intimate survey of Ronstadt’s family favorites, and even incorporates the voices of her brothers, Mike and Pete, and her niece, Melinda Marie, which gives some of the tracks the shade of a campfire sing-along. Tried-and-true mariachi mainstays abound, from languid opener “Por un Amor” —- the Gilberto Parra classic that had been perfected by Beltrán, “el Rey del Mariachi” Vicente Fernandez, and other greats—to the boisterous huapango “La Cigarra” and the hushed harmonies of “El Sol Que Tú Eres.”
Her sheer joy onstage was palpable, too. Much of the footage from the subsequent Canciones tour shows a beaming, swooning, or otherwise enthralled Ronstadt, nailing each note and the lyrics. This was another hurdle for her, and one she continually worked to improve, as she grew up around Spanish-speaking family but is not bilingual herself. “My family didn’t bother teaching Spanish to me, because they liked to use it for privacy,” she says. “They could gossip in Spanish and the kids wouldn’t know what they were saying.”
Canciones tours broke new ground, too, in their mainstream embrace of mariachi: Ronstadt brought the bands who joined her on the record out on the road, and thus introduced thousands of fans across the country to the music that played such a formative role in her growth, and identity, as a performer. Its pop culture imprint extended beyond the venues as well, with a PBS special and a Sesame Street cameo in which Ronstadt -— in her full mariachi regalia, with flowers in her hair—sang an English version of “La Charreada” with Elmo. By the time Ronstadt joined the lineup of the Tucson Mariachi Festival in 1987 to duet with her hero, Beltrán, it was clear that her Canciones era wasn’t a static thing dictated by a record’s release: This album was the missing piece, and one that she was eager to share with listeners as both a product of, and tribute to, the sounds that made her who she is.
“The combination of standards, operetta, and Mexican music gave me a whole voice,” she says. “It was kind of like the standards represented the part of me that is my appearance. The Mexican music represented my ethnicity, how I ethnically recognize myself. Mexican music really gave me a box of tools that I could use.”
Canciones remains one of Ronstadt’s most successful albums, and its overwhelmingly positive reception at the time caught her off guard. “I was lucky that I sold those standards records and those Mexican records in such numbers,” she says. “I didn’t expect to. I was just doing it to be self-indulgent.” It’s been certified two-times platinum by the RIAA, spent two weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s Regional Mexican Albums chart (and rose to No. 42 on the Billboard 200 albums chart), won her a Grammy for Best Mexican-American performance, and was inducted into the Library of Congress as a culturally significant recording earlier this year.
She and Fuentes hit it off so well that they continued to work together after their Canciones triumph. Mas Canciones followed in 1991 (she actually prefers it to its predecessor: “It’s much better! I knew how to sing better then!”), and 1992’s Tropicália-tinged Frenesí came after that. Spanish songs became more commonplace on Ronstadt’s albums as her career progressed—she singles out 1993’s Winter Light, which featured “Adonde Voy,” as her “best record to date”—and she continued to take risks, recording a Cajun album with Ann Savoy, Adieu False Heart, in 2006. This would be her last album, as Ronstadt’s diagnosis came shortly thereafter, which prompted her retirement from performing and recording.
Ronstadt’s passion for Canciones de Mi Padre, her Mexican heritage, and the importance of properly centering it as the touchstone of her career have defined her twilight years. She has supported humanitarian efforts at the southern border of the United States, advocated for organizations offering aid to immigrants in Arizona, and written a new memoir, Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands, that speaks to her family ties to the region and her experiences growing up in the high desert. And she continues to underline the significance of música mexicana in any conversation about her music.
In many ways, Canciones is the culmination of everything Ronstadt had worked toward. It bottled up the verve and tremendous showmanship she honed onstage as she cut her teeth in rock ’n’ roll. It challenged her to put the training and technique she acquired through her Broadway experience and American songbook albums to work. And, most importantly, it gave her the opportunity to celebrate her family, and the music they loved. Canciones de Mi Padre may have been a risk. For Ronstadt, it was always the reward.
“I never chose songs because they were hits, because I thought they were hits,” she says. She’s responding to a question about what advice she’d offer to young musicians, but her answer is, unintentionally, the road map for her own journey. “I chose them because I had an urgent need to sing them at that time, even if they weren’t appropriate for my voice. I made a lot of bad records because I was loving a song, and it didn’t love me back. You have to do only songs that are in your heart, they come from your heart, to tell your story.” — Hilary Hughes
