Linda Ronstadt sang rock, country, soul and mariachi, until illness took her voice
Linda Ronstadt moved between rock, folk, country, pop and soul, sang on more than 120 albums and won 11 Grammys. After 2000 she felt her voice slipping. By 2011 she had retired, and she later revealed she could no longer sing at all, the result of a degenerative brain disease.
Ronstadt was born on July 15, 1946, in Tucson, Arizona, the third of four children, and grew up Catholic on the family's 10-acre ranch. Her father ran a prosperous machinery business and came from a pioneering Arizona family of Mexican descent; her great-grandfather, an engineer from Hanover, had reached the Southwest in the 1840s when it was still part of Mexico. Tucson named its central bus terminal in 1991 after her grandfather, a wagon maker who supplied the city's first mule-drawn streetcars. Her mother's father, Lloyd Copeman, held nearly 700 patents and made millions from a flexible rubber ice cube tray.
The numbers from her recording career are large: 24 studio albums, 38 singles on the Billboard Hot 100, ten of them in the top 10, and three chart-topping albums. Her only American number one single was You're No Good. In Britain her duet Don't Know Much with Aaron Neville reached number 2. Her collaborators ran from Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris, her partners in the group Trio, to Frank Zappa, Philip Glass, Johnny Cash and bandleader Nelson Riddle. A Jazz Times critic judged her voice perhaps the finest of her generation.
She scaled back after 2000, released her last solo album in 2004 and gave her final concert in 2009. The condition behind her decline was first diagnosed as Parkinson's disease and later identified as progressive supranuclear palsy. She has stayed in public life through speaking tours, a 2013 memoir called Simple Dreams and a 2019 documentary, The Sound of My Voice.
Honours accumulated late. In 2014 she joined the rock hall in Cleveland and received the National Medal of Arts that year, a lifetime achievement Latin Grammy in 2011 and the Recording Academy's equivalent in 2016. In 2019 she shared a Hollywood Walk of Fame star with Parton and Harris and was among that year's Kennedy Center honorees.
Source: Linda Ronstadt
