Perfectly Secure yet Ineffective: Canonical Paraphrasing as Optimal Stegodefense
Linda Maria Ronstadt (born July 15, 1946) is an American former singer and musician who has performed and recorded in diverse genres including rock, folk, pop, country, and soul.[1]Ronstadt has earned 11 Grammy Awards,[2] three American Music Awards, two Academy of Country Music awards, an Emmy Award, and an ALMA Award.
Linda Maria Ronstadt (born July 15, 1946) is an American former singer and musician who has performed and recorded in diverse genres including rock, folk, pop, country, and soul.[1]
Ronstadt has earned 11 Grammy Awards,[2] three American Music Awards, two Academy of Country Music awards, an Emmy Award, and an ALMA Award. Many of her albums have been certified gold, platinum or multiplatinum in the United States and internationally. She has also earned nominations for a Tony Award and a Golden Globe award. She was awarded the Latin Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award by the Latin Recording Academy in 2011 and also awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award by the Recording Academy in 2016. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in April 2014.[3] On July 28, 2014, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts and Humanities.[4][15] In 2019, she received a star jointly with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for their work as the group Trio.[16][17] Ronstadt was among five honorees who received the 2019 Kennedy Center Honors for lifetime artistic achievements.
Ronstadt has released 24 studio albums and 15 compilation or greatest hits albums. She charted 38 US Billboard Hot 100 singles. Twenty-one of those singles reached the top 40, ten reached the top 10, and one reached number one ("You're No Good"). Ronstadt also charted in the UK; two of her duets, "Somewhere Out There" with James Ingram and "Don't Know Much" with Aaron Neville, peaked at numbers 8 and 2 respectively, and the single "Blue Bayou" reached number 35 on the UK Singles Chart.[18][19] She has charted 36 albums, ten top-10 albums, and three number one albums on the US Billboard albums chart.[20] Ronstadt has lent her voice to over 120 albums, collaborating with artists in many genres, including Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Bette Midler, Billy Eckstine,[21] Frank Zappa, Carla Bley (Escalator Over the Hill), Rosemary Clooney, Flaco Jiménez, Philip Glass, Warren Zevon, Gram Parsons, Neil Young, Paul Simon, Earl Scruggs, Johnny Cash, and Nelson Riddle.[22][23] Christopher Loudon, of Jazz Times, wrote in 2004 that Ronstadt is "blessed with arguably the most sterling set of pipes of her generation".[24]
Ronstadt reduced her activity after 2000 when she felt her singing voice deteriorating.[25] She released her final solo album in 2004 and her final collaborative album in 2006, and performed her final live concert in 2009. She announced her retirement in 2011 and revealed shortly afterward that she is no longer able to sing, as a result of a degenerative condition initially diagnosed as Parkinson's disease but later determined to be progressive supranuclear palsy.[25][a] Since that time, Ronstadt has continued to make public appearances, going on a number of public speaking tours in the 2010s. She published an autobiography, Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir,[26] in September 2013. A documentary based on her memoirs, Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice, was released in 2019.
Early life
Linda Maria Ronstadt was born in Tucson, Arizona on July 15, 1946,[27] the third of four children of Gilbert Ronstadt (1911–1995), a prosperous machinery merchant who ran the F. Ronstadt Co.,[28] and Ruth Mary (née Copeman) Ronstadt (1914–1982), a homemaker.[29]
Ronstadt had a Roman Catholic upbringing[30] and was raised on the family's 10-acre (4 ha) ranch with her siblings Peter (who served as Tucson's chief of police from 1981 to 1991), Michael, and Gretchen. The family was featured in Family Circle magazine in 1953.[31]
Ronstadt family history
Ronstadt's father came from a pioneering Arizona ranching family[32] and was of Mexican descent with a German male ancestor.[33] The family's influence on and contributions to Arizona's history, including wagon making, commerce, pharmacies, and music, are documented in the library of the University of Arizona.[34] Her great-grandfather, the engineer Friedrich August Ronstadt (who went by Federico Augusto Ronstadt), immigrated first to Sonora, Mexico, and later to the Southwest (at that time a part of Mexico) in the 1840s from Hanover, Germany. He married Margarita Redondo y Vásquez, a Mexican citizen and eventually settled in Tucson.[35][36] In 1991, the City of Tucson opened its central transit terminal on March 16 and dedicated it to Linda's grandfather, Federico José María Ronstadt, a local pioneer businessman; he was a wagon maker whose early contribution to the city's mobility included six mule-drawn streetcars, delivered in 1903–04.[37]
Ronstadt's mother Ruth Mary, of German, English, and Dutch ancestry, was raised in Flint, Michigan. Ruth Mary's father, Lloyd Groff Copeman, a prolific inventor and holder of nearly 700 patents, invented an early form of the electric toaster, many refrigerator devices, the grease gun, the first electric stove, and an early form of the microwave oven.[38] His flexible rubber ice cube tray earned him millions of dollars in royalties.[39]
Career summary
Everybody has their own level of doing their music. ... Mine just happened to resonate over the years, in one way and another, with a significant enough number of people so that I could do it professionally.
—Linda Ronstadt[40]
Establishing her professional career in the mid-1960s at the forefront of California's emerging folk rock and country rock movements – genres which defined post-1960s rock music – Ronstadt joined forces with Bobby Kimmel and Kenny Edwards and became the lead singer of a folk-rock trio, the Stone Poneys. Later, as a solo artist, she released Hand Sown ... Home Grown in 1969, which has been described as the first alternative country record by a female recording artist.[41] Although fame eluded her during these years, Ronstadt actively toured with The Doors, Neil Young, Jackson Browne, and others, appeared numerous times on television shows, and began to contribute her singing to albums by other artists.
With the release of chart-topping albums such as Heart Like a Wheel, Simple Dreams, and Living in the USA, Ronstadt became the first female "arena class" rock star. She set records as one of the top-grossing concert artists of the decade.[41][42][43][44] Referred to as the "First Lady of Rock"[32][45] and the "Queen of Rock", Ronstadt was voted the Top Female Pop Singer of the 1970s.[32] Her rock-and-roll image was as famous as her music; she appeared six times on the cover of Rolling Stone and on the covers of Newsweek and Time.
In the 1980s, Ronstadt performed on Broadway and received a Tony nomination for her performance in The Pirates of Penzance,[46] teamed with the composer Philip Glass, recorded traditional music, and collaborated with the conductor Nelson Riddle, an event at that time viewed as an original and unorthodox move for a rock-and-roll artist. This venture paid off,[47] and Ronstadt remained one of the music industry's best-selling acts throughout the 1980s, with multi-platinum-selling albums such as Mad Love; What's New; Canciones de Mi Padre; and Cry Like a Rainstorm, Howl Like the Wind. She continued to tour, collaborate, and record celebrated albums, such as Winter Light and Hummin' to Myself, until her retirement in 2011.[48] Most of Ronstadt's albums are certified gold, platinum, or multi-platinum.[49][50]
Having sold in excess of 100 million records worldwide[51] and setting records as one of the top-grossing concert performers for over a decade, Ronstadt was the most successful female singer of the 1970s and stands as one of the most successful female recording artists in U.S. history. She opened many doors for women in rock and roll and other musical genres by championing songwriters and musicians, pioneering her chart success onto the concert circuit, and being in the vanguard of many musical movements.[41]
Career overview
Early influences
I don't record (any type of genre of music) that I didn't hear in my family's living room by the time I was 10. It just is my rule that I don't break because ... I can't do it authentically ... I really think that you're just hard-wiring (synapses) in your brain up until the age of maybe 12 or 10, and there are certain things you can't learn in an authentic way after that.
—Linda Ronstadt[52]
Ronstadt's early family life was filled with music and tradition, which influenced the stylistic and musical choices she later made in her career. Growing up, she listened to many types of music, including Mexican music, which was sung by her entire family and was a staple in her childhood.[53]
Ronstadt has remarked that all the styles she has recorded on her own records – rock and roll, rhythm and blues, gospel, opera, country, choral, and mariachi – are music she heard her family sing in their living room or heard played on the radio by the age of 10. She credits her mother for her appreciation of Gilbert and Sullivan and her father for introducing her to the traditional pop and Great American Songbook repertoire that she would, in turn, help reintroduce to an entire generation.[52][54]
If I didn't hear it on the radio, or if my dad wasn't playing it on the piano, or if my brother wasn't playing it on the guitar or singing it in his boys' choir, or my mother and sister weren't practicing a Broadway tune or a Gilbert and Sullivan song, then I can't do it today. It's as simple as that. All of my influences and my authenticity are a direct result of the music played in that Tucson living room.[55]
—Linda Ronstadt
Early on, her singing style had been influenced by singers such as Lola Beltrán and Édith Piaf; she has called their singing and rhythms "more like Greek music ... It's sort of like 6/8 time signature ... very hard driving and very intense."[56] She also drew influence from country singer Hank Williams.
She has said that "all girl singers" eventually "have to curtsy to Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday".[32] Of Maria Callas, Ronstadt says, "There's no one in her league. That's it. Period. I learn more ... about singing rock n roll from listening to Maria Callas records than I ever would from listening to pop music for a month of Sundays. ... She's the greatest chick singer ever."[57] She admires Callas for her musicianship and her attempts to push 20th-century singing, particularly opera, back into the bel canto "natural style of singing".[58]
A self-described product of American radio of the 1950s and 1960s, Ronstadt is a fan of its eclectic and diverse music programming.[54]
Beginning of professional career
At age 14, Ronstadt formed a folk trio with her brother Peter and sister Gretchen. The group played coffeehouses, fraternity houses, and other small venues, billing themselves as "the Union City Ramblers" and "the Three Ronstadts", and they even recorded themselves at a Tucson studio under the name "the New Union Ramblers".[59] Their repertoire included the music they grew up on – folk, country, bluegrass, and Mexican.[60] But increasingly, Ronstadt wanted to make a union of folk music and rock 'n' roll,[44] and in 1964, after a semester at the University of Arizona,[61] the 18-year-old decided to move to Los Angeles.[62][63][64]
The Stone Poneys
Main article: Stone Poneys
Ronstadt visited a friend from Tucson, Bobby Kimmel, in Los Angeles during Easter break from college in 1964, and later that year, shortly before her eighteenth birthday,[62] decided to move there permanently to form a band with him.[63] Kimmel had already begun co-writing folk-rock songs with guitarist-songwriter Kenny Edwards, and eventually the three of them were signed by Nik Venet to Capitol in the summer of 1966 as "the Stone Poneys". The trio released three albums in a 15-month period in 1967–68: The Stone Poneys; Evergreen, Volume 2; and Linda Ronstadt, Stone Poneys and Friends, Vol. III. The band is widely known for their hit single "Different Drum" (written by Michael Nesmith prior to his joining the Monkees), which reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart as well as number 12 in Cashbox magazine. Nearly 50 years later, the song remains one of Ronstadt's most popular recordings.[65]
Solo career
Still contractually obligated to Capitol Records, Ronstadt released her first solo album, Hand Sown ... Home Grown, in 1969. It has been called the first alternative country record by a female recording artist.[41] During this same period, she contributed to the Music from Free Creek "super session" project.
Ronstadt provided the vocals for some commercials during this period, including one for Remington electric razors, in which a multitracked Ronstadt and Frank Zappa claimed that the electric razor "cleans you, thrills you ... may even keep you from getting busted".[66]
Ronstadt's second solo album, Silk Purse, was released in March 1970. Recorded entirely in Nashville, it was produced by Elliot Mazer, whom Ronstadt chose on the advice of Janis Joplin, who had worked with her on the Cheap Thrills album.[67] The Silk Purse album cover showed Ronstadt in a muddy pigpen, while the back and inside cover depicted her onstage wearing bright red. Ronstadt has stated that she was not pleased with the album, although it provided her with her first solo hit, the multi-format single "Long Long Time", and earned her first Grammy nomination (for Best Contemporary Vocal Performance/Female).
Touring
Judy Henske, who was the then reigning queen of folk music, said to me at The Troubadour, "Honey, in this town there are four sexes. Men, women, homosexuals, and girl singers."
—Linda Ronstadt[68]
Soon after she went solo in the late 1960s, one of her first backing bands was the pioneering country-rock band Swampwater, which combined Cajun and swamp rock elements in their music. Its members included Cajun fiddler Gib Guilbeau and John Beland, who later joined the Flying Burrito Brothers,[69] as well as Stan Pratt, Thad Maxwell, and Eric White, brother of Clarence White of the Byrds. Swampwater went on to back Ronstadt during TV appearances on The Johnny Cash Show[70] and The Mike Douglas Show, and at the Big Sur Folk Festival.[71]
Another backing band included Don Henley, Glenn Frey, Bernie Leadon, and Randy Meisner, who went on to form the Eagles. They toured with her for a short period in 1971 and played on Linda Ronstadt, her eponymous third album, from which a failed single, Ronstadt's version of Jackson Browne's "Rock Me on the Water", was drawn. At this stage, Ronstadt began working with producer and boyfriend John Boylan. She said, "As soon as I started working with John Boylan, I started co-producing myself. I was always a part of my productions. But I always needed a producer who would carry out my whims."[59] Also in 1971, Ronstadt began talking with David Geffen about moving from Capitol Records to Geffen's Asylum Records label.[72]
In 1975, Ronstadt performed shows with Jackson Browne, the Eagles, and Toots and the Maytals.[73] In these shows she would sing lead vocal on numerous songs including the Eagles' "Desperado" while singing background and playing tambourine and acoustic guitar on others.[74]