(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Stills)
Sun 15 March 2026 21:00, UK
There’s a good chance that any country rocker would have given their left arm to play with someone like Linda Ronstadt.
Even though Don Henley and Glenn Frey had bigger and better things to worry about when they put together the Eagles, Ronstadt had that signature voice that could cut through any bar that held her band whenever she launched into some of her greatest tunes. But while she was one of the most graceful members of the California rock scene at the time, being edgy and dangerous usually wasn’t the first words that came to mind when looking at her music.
That doesn’t mean that she couldn’t level an entire venue with her voice if she wanted to. ‘You’re No Good’ had the perfect amount of power behind it whenever she performed, but her strong suit was always singing ballads. From the time that she worked with Peter Asher finding songs to sing to working with legends like Nelson Riddle, there wasn’t much ground that she couldn’t cover when she had sweeping strings behind her or the right acoustic guitar accompaniment.
And whenever she guested with her rock and roll brethren, she always brought a lot more sweetness to every one of their tunes. ‘Tumbling Dice’ sounded so much better when Ronstadt was singing on it, and while Henley’s voice will always be a key part of ‘Desperado’, it’s hard not to feel genuinely moved when Ronstadt sings a song about an outlaw that needs to hang things up before he goes one step too far.
That kind of outlaw attitude seemed to fit like a glove with her, but anyone would have been a little bit intimidated standing next to one of the godfathers of outlaw country. Even if people had never bothered listening to country music in their lives knew the aura surrounding Johnny Cash, but when Ronstadt first performed with Cash for the first time, there was one moment when she was almost kicked off of doing his show altogether.
According to one of the stylists on the set of Cash’s show, June Carter Cash was absolutely furious at the idea of a rock and roll singer duetting with her husband without being properly dressed, saying, “June was sitting out there [in front of the stage], and she said, ‘That girl doesn’t have any panties on. She can’t sing with my Johnny like that.’ So they went over to [the department store] Cain-Sloan’s and got Linda some panties.”
That seems like a relatively small ask when looking at it today, but you have to remember how the country world operated back then. Music Row was an institution that no one could have ever messed with, and even if they had the slightest concern about what they were showing on their network, they would go the extra mile to make sure that anyone that they showed on Cash’s show was going to do so properly.
Which is a little bit funny considering the kind of character that Cash was throughout his career. When he was in his prime, he didn’t give a shit whether some of his actions would be considered a little too risque, and the fact that they couldn’t let Ronstadt on in her normal clothes and still let Cash play in a prison is still one of the funnier cases of double standards to come out of the music industry.
You can definitely chalk it up to a different time, but the fact that we were almost robbed of two titans of country music singing together is hilarious. There was no reason to think that Ronstadt would have been the least bit threatening to June, and while ‘The Man in Black’ did have his fair share of dark shades to him, walking away from his wife wasn’t going to be one of them when he walked up on that stage.