(Credits: Far Out / Linda Ronstadt)
Sun 29 March 2026 20:45, UK
Linda Ronstadt didn’t get into the music business to compete with every other singer in Los Angeles.
She was simply making the best music that she could whenever she started singing in the Troubadour Bar, and while she was leagues above almost any other singer that she came across, she always had a slight problem listening to her own voice when going back to a lot of her records. She knew that she was fallible, and while it’s hard to knock a song like ‘Heart Like A Wheel’, Ronstadt knew that some singers were able to put her to shame with only a few notes.
But when you look at some of her best songs, there is no one else who could manage to do what she did on songs like ‘You’re No Good’. She was never a big songwriter throughout her career, but her greatest strength was taking the songs that everyone from Jackson Browne to JD Souther to Warren Zevon put out and turning them into pieces of pure gold. She needed to believe what she was singing, and even when working on Elvis Costello tunes, she was a lot more confident in every single word she sang.
Even the covers that she did managed to be miles better than anything that her contemporaries would have done. There isn’t a soul in rock and roll that could claim to match what The Rolling Stones did, but if you listen to Ronstadt’s version of ‘Tumbling Dice’, it’s a much closer call as to which one is better when looking at her performance and Mick Jagger’s. But when she stopped singing rock and roll, she realised that her voice was much better suited to other genres half the time.
What’s New was enough proof that she could sing the Great American Songbook as well as anyone else, and when listening to her Mexican albums, she was clearly indebted to that music ever since she started singing as a child. But when she looked back on her days in California with every other singer-songwriter, she knew that Joni Mitchell and Bonnie Raitt were leagues above what she was doing.
Ronstadt could hold her own, but there was no sense in trying to compete with the perfection she was hearing, saying, “I felt like the freshman class and they were the senior class. Fortunately, I’ve never felt that music is a competition, so it doesn’t matter if Joni Mitchell can sing better than I can, or Bonnie Raitt, who can sing rings around me anytime. I just did what I did and tried the best that I could.” But that all depends on the kind of music that each singer was working with.
Mitchell didn’t want to compete with anyone, either, but if you look at what she was doing, no one else was going to touch what she was capable of on Blue. And even when working on her jazz-inspired albums later on in life, she was able to weave absolutely beautiful pieces of music together even when she didn’t need the most operatic vocal range to pull everything off. But if Mitchell was more tender, Raitt was the perfect package for what a rootsy rocker was supposed to be.
She had studied under some of the best blues musicians when she first got started, but when looking through some of her finest albums like Nick of Time, she was capable of going in many different directions. ‘I Can’t Make You Love Me’ is still one of the most gripping love songs ever made, and she could have easily given Ronstadt a run for her money had she started working in the country field for a little while longer.
But even if Ronstadt was left in the dust by some of her contemporaries, she was more than happy to see a lot more female representation in the rock and roll scene. The whole music industry seemed dominated by the greatest male songwriters of the time, but if Bob Dylan had Joan Baez to help balance him out, bands like Eagles and Crosby, Stills and Nash were going to have some competition in everyone from Ronstadt to Raitt to Mitchell to Stevie Nicks and beyond.
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