Linda Ronstadt

By the autumn of 1977, people were arguing about Linda Ronstadt’s “Blue Bayou” before they’d even heard it — which tells you something about the cultural weather that year. Roy Orbison had written the song with Joe Melson in 1961, shaped it somewhere on a road trip between Arkansas and Texas, and released it on … Read more

By the time Linda Ronstadt walked into the Sound Factory in Los Angeles in the summer of 1974, she had been at this for seven years — seven years of strong taste, wrong luck, and a voice that nobody quite knew what to do with. She had three solo albums for Capitol Records, each one … Read more