Album titles like Hand Sown…Home Grown, Simple Dreams, and Hasten Down the Wind celebrated a naturalness that was complemented by a meticulous attention to musical detail and one of the greatest ears of the rock era. Raised on country and the ranchera music that echoed through her Tuscon, Arizona, neighborhood, Ronstadt sang with a verve and directness that eradicated the pretentiousness that could sometimes afflict the children of the counterculture. “She is offering us something very valuable for the '70s: not a fantasy figure, but a reality figure,” wrote the rock scribe Tom Nolan in 1974. In a time of fading utopian hopes, she emerged as an emissary able to connect old musical ways with the new consciousness of her own maverick generation. Her voice didn’t seem just to come from the house, but out of the earth, over the water into the rickety little town and the scrubland and forest beyond it.”īeginning in the 1970s, Linda Ronstadt’s singing has had that kind of geological effect throughout popular music: steadying, seemingly able to erase time and trends within one flow of feeling that goes below the surface and the deeper strata of American consciousness. “Gene was glad it was Linda Ronstadt, not someone soppy or sickly sweet,” Wakefield wrote.
In Home Free, his 1977 novel of faded denim hippie dreams, Dan Wakefield described his wandering anti-hero Gene Barrett overhearing a song on a nearby record player as he dozes in a hammock in Maine - Linda Ronstadt singing her folkish country ballad “Long Long Time” in the alto that wafted through many a window in those imperfect, exploratory days.
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