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Post by the Scribe on Sept 25, 2022 3:12:19 GMT
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Parade Linda Ronstadt Shares Songs of the Southwest: The Stories Behind Her Hits
Jim Farber September 9, 2022·10 min read
In this article:
Linda Ronstadt Linda Ronstadt American singer (born 1946)
Kenny Edwards American musician (1946-2010)
These are the traditional songs she fondly remembers hearing and singing with her family.
These songs, some available on Linda Ronstadt’s new album, Feels Like Home: Songs From the Sonoran Borderlands—Linda Ronstadt’s Musical Odyssey, are among the traditional tunes she fondly remembers hearing and singing with her family.
Related: Linda Ronstadt on the Disease That Stole Her Voice, Her Mexican Heritage and Her New Album parade.com/celebrities/linda-ronstadt-parkinsons-disease-new-book
The Stories Behind Linda Ronstadt's Favorite Songs “El Sueño” (the dream) “My brothers, Peter and Mike, sang this beautiful huapango folk song with me on my record Mas Canciones. We learned the harmonies as kids from a record by Trío Tariácuri, three brothers who were beloved musicians in Mexico for decades, starting in the 1930s.”
“I Never Will Marry” “Dolly Parton and I both love this song and recorded it together. According to Ronstadt family rules, this was my sister’s song, because she was the first of us to sing it. But Suzy married three times, so it became mine.”
Related: Who Is Dolly Parton's Husband? parade.com/1059087/lindsaylowe/dolly-parton-husband-carl-dean-marriage/
“El Crucifijo de Piedra” (the stone crucifix) “I learned this huapango from the version sung by Miguel Aceves Mejía, the ranchera idol and actor. In it, an abandoned lover stands alone and crying in front of a church, so sad that the crucified Christ cries too. It’s one of the most beautiful songs in the literature.”
“Lo Siento Mi Vida” (I’m sorry my love) “Kenny Edwards and I wrote this with my dad. Kenny wanted it to be all in Spanish, but after he wrote the first line, we needed help for the rest. We told my dad what we wanted to say, and the song came together in a three-way phone conversation.”
“Old Paint” “We always used to sing this old cowboy song as kids. We never heard it on a record; it was just there, in the air. ‘The song smells of saddle leather,’ Carl Sandburg wrote of it in his 1927 folk-music anthology, The American Songbag. He said it came ‘from a buckaroo who was last heard of as heading for the border with friends in both Tucson and El Paso.’ For my version on the record Simple Dreams, I played guitar myself, in my uniquely incompetent style.”
“La Calandria” (the songbird) “This is a naughty song that Peter, Mike and I used to sing. It made us giggle. Singing it in Spanish somehow made it seem not quite as dirty, with its lines about love and women’s petticoats and things that happen in men’s undershorts.”
“Y Andale” (get on with it) “I recorded this with my niece Mindy when she was 15. She sang it so well, with lovely innocence, even though it’s about drunken debauchery. Our version was a hit in Mexico City.”
“Ragtime Cowboy Joe” “We kids used to sing this in three-part harmony in the car. Our mom would sing it with us too. I didn’t hear a recording of it until I was an adult. I like the version by the Sons of the Pioneers.”
“A la Orilla de un Palmar” (at the edge of a palm grove) “This is one of those songs that’s a time tunnel back to childhood, with Peter, Suzy, Mike and me singing in the back seat of the family car, or in the kitchen, our hands in the dishwater. Mike also sang it in a trio with our cousins John and Bill. It’s about a poor orphan alone in the world.”
“Blue Shadows” “Peter learned this cowboy song in his boys’ chorus and then taught it to our brother Mike and our cousins John and Bill. Those three performed often as the Ronstadt Cousins, and this song was a good showcase for the family blend of voices.”
“Canadian Moon” My brother Mike wrote and recorded this with his band, Ronstadt Generations. It’s my favorite song of his. It came to him in Canada, naturally, where everything is so green and lush it can make a homesick Tucsonan cry. This song shows the hold the desert can have on you.”
“Barrio Viejo” (old neighborhood) “The great Chicano bandleader and songwriter Lalo Guerrero never forgot how Tucson bulldozed and buried his old neighborhood in the 1960s, in the name of urban renewal. In 1990, this song brought it back to life. He was in his 70s then, still working at the top of his talent, and this may be his greatest song.” parade.com/937586/parade/life-quotes/
“Los Chucos Suaves” (the cool dudes) “This song was a hit in the 1940s, when Lalo was in his prime as a bandleader. The trumpet player and piano player on his recording of this song—about young, hip Chicanos in Los Angeles dancing and getting drunk—are particularly skilled.”
“La Burrita” (the little donkey) I never heard this on a record when I was little; I knew it from singing it myself and having it sung to me—including once by Lalo and my dad serenading me on my 3rd birthday in the traditional Mexican way, at 2 in the morning.” parade.com/1035465/marynliles/birthday-quotes/ parade.com/936820/parade/good-morning-quotes/
“Adonde Voy” (Where am I going?) “Tish Hinojosa, the Texas singer and songwriter, wrote this song about hope, love and loneliness. A fugitive on the run from immigration misses home and worries about a lover left behind. I sang it on a record called Winter Light.”
“Dreams of the San Joaquin” “This is about a migrant worker in the San Joaquin Valley in Dust Bowl days—a song of desperate times in a beautiful, bountiful land. Jack Wesley Routh and Randy Sharp wrote it, and a Ronstadt family chorus joined me on the record [We Ran]: my siblings, Suzy, Peter and Mike; my cousins Johnny and Bill; and my niece Mindy.”
“Flor Silvestre” (wild flower) “It’s hard to describe the way the great Trío Calaveras sing an old folk tune like this. They have such beautiful harmonies. When the indigenous rhythm of the huapango meets the almost military precision of their joined voices, the effect is mystical.”
“Por un Amor” (for a love) “I adore Lucha Reyes’ version of this song. She was the first of Mexico’s great women ranchera singers, and she has not been matched. She started out as an opera singer but damaged her vocal cords and lost her operatic voice. It became husky—perfect for ranchera music.”
“Cucurrucucú Paloma” (the cooing dove) “This is Lola Beltrán’s signature song. It’s gorgeous and full of passion, and she sings it to perfection. Like many huapangos, there’s a lot of falsetto in it, which is hard to do. A song like this is usually sung by a man, but Lola proved that women can sing falsetto beautifully too.”
“La Mariquita” (the ladybug) “Amalia Mendoza, sister to the members of Trío Tariácuri, was considered the most musically precise of the ranchera singers. She was known for this traditional song. It’s similar in its rhythm pattern to a huapango. The singer asks a young woman, the little ladybug, to ‘cover me with your shawl, because I’m freezing to death.’”
“Paloma Negra” (black dove) “If I had heard Chavela Vargas sing this ranchera song or anything else when I was growing up, I would have changed my whole singing style. Songwriters loved her because she was so musical—she could interpret a song just as they had intended it, with its full emotional reading. Her version of this sorrowful song is unbeatable. She owns it.”
“Malagueña Salerosa” (enchanting woman from Málaga) “Here’s another thrilling huapango, romantic and passionate. The Trío Calaveras sang it beautifully. It can be hard to pull off, with all its falsetto parts, but my brother Peter did it well.” parade.com/936221/marynliles/romantic-love-quotes/
“Plegaría Guadalupana” (Guadalupe prayer) “The Trío Tariácuri’s vocal style was featured beautifully in their recording of this song. It reflects many Mexicans’ devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe, who by Catholic tradition appeared to the peasant Juan Diego in 1531. (You don’t often hear the backstory: that Juan Diego was actually an Aztec priest, and that the spot where he claimed to have seen the Virgin had once been a shrine to Tonantzin, the Aztecs’ Mother Earth, who made the corn grow. In other words, Mexico’s patron saint is an indigenous goddess in disguise, which is why I love her.)” parade.com/1142013/kelseypelzer/new-year-prayer/ parade.com/1292137/parade/corn-recipes/
“El Camino” (the path) “This one’s sort of spooky. The Trío Tariácuri sing it in a yodeling falsetto style. It’s about traveling long distances through the night on horseback, and the daunting things you encounter. Their voices sound mysterious, almost supernatural.”
“El Hielo (ICE)” “This song is by a Los Angeles band I love, La Santa Cecilia. Its lead singer, La Marisoul, has the most interesting voice I’ve heard in years. The title is a play on words: ‘Hielo’ is Spanish for ‘ice,’ and ICE is the acronym for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The song is a sensitive representation of the true human cost of unfair immigration laws.”
“Sonora Querida” (beloved Sonora) “Los Cenzontles recorded this with David Hidalgo of Los Lobos. Many consider it the unofficial state song of Sonora.”
“Ojitos Negros” (little black eyes) “Los Cenzontles sang this traditional Mexican song on their 2008 album, Songs of Wood and Steel, and then again on San Patricio, a 2010 album by the Chieftains and Ry Cooder. Their a cappella treatment is amazingly rich and pure.”
“La Manta” (the blanket), “Arenita Azul” (blue sands), “El Torero” (the bullfighter), “Naninan Upirin” (How will I do it) “These four traditional songs are part of the repertoire of Los Cenzontles’ youth group, Los Cenzontles Juvenil, made up of kids age 8 to 16. They start young, absorbing deep traditions and rhythms, and learning to sing in both Spanish and Mexican indigenous languages, of which there are 68. They can really play. ‘La Manta’ is a son jarocho from Veracruz; ‘Arenita Azul’ is a chilena from Oaxaca; ‘El Torero’ is a son abajeño from Jalisco; and ‘Naninan Upirin’ is a son abajeño from the P’urhépecha indigenous people living in the Michoacán region.”
“The Dreamer” “When I introduced Jackson Browne to Eugene Rodriguez and his cultural organization Los Cenzontles, I felt they would hit it off. Jackson and Eugene soon teamed up to write this beautiful song, about a family divided by the border and our unjust immigration laws.”
“Somebody Please” “This soulful lowrider standard from the late ’60s was made popular by Manuel (Big Manny) Gonzales, who had a band in East L.A. called the Blazers. He was a really good singer. In 2021, Los Cenzontles, La Marisoul and David Hidalgo and Cesar Rosas of Los Lobos sang it as a tribute to Big Manny, who died in 2016.”
“Los Hermanos” (the brothers) “This is an example of how Los Cenzontles reaches out to the greater community—in this case the San Francisco Symphony. Sometimes when you load classical players onto traditional songs and styles, it doesn’t quite work, but this collaboration was very successful. I admire the way Los Cenzontles can find ways to build on and revitalize old traditions, as in this song about the bonds that connect migrants of many countries, united by the perilous journey north to the United States: ‘I have so many brothers that I can’t count them all.’”
“Voy Caminando” (I go walking) “Eugene Rodriguez wrote this song about a migrant’s journey toward his dream. ‘Tomorrow I go walking / There is nothing more for me here / That is why I am looking / For my future on the horizon.’ The rhythm is provided by the dancers’ feet.”
“La Pelota” (the ball) “Eugene also wrote this political tune, disguising it as a song about soccer. The ball is a metaphor for how Mexican Americans are kicked this way and that, side to side, up and down, by politicians and others who take them for granted. It’s a great song, and I love its driving rhythm.”
Related: When Linda Ronstadt Was Nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame parade.com/215011/viannguyen/nirvana-kiss-linda-ronstadt-among-16-rock-and-roll-hall-of-fame-nominees/[/a][/font][/font]
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Post by the Scribe on Sept 28, 2022 21:39:32 GMT
BOOKS Linda Ronstadt on Her New Memoir, Feels Like Home, and Her Mexican American Heritage BY ABBY AGUIRRE www.vogue.com/article/linda-ronstadt-feels-like-home-interview
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On a beautiful summer day in late August, Linda Ronstadt is standing in the living room of her house in San Francisco, tapping on the keys of her black grand piano. The upper keys, specifically. A piano tuner has just visited, and Ronstadt is inspecting his work. “That sounds pinky,” she says after a while. She tests a few of the neighboring keys. “They’re all pinky.” Asked what she means by “pinky,” Ronstadt explains that the errant keys sound as if they are speaking the word “pink”—that the sound they make is shorter and more abrupt than it should be. This is in contrast to the lower keys, which produce a longer, more accurate sound.
For readers too young to know: Linda Ronstadt was the first female solo superstar of our time. The first to pack arenas. The first to have five platinum albums in a row. The highest-paid woman in music. The Queen of Rock. When her album Heart Like a Wheel went to No. 1 on the pop charts, in 1974, it did so by overtaking Led Zeppelin and Elton John. When she won her second American Music Award for favorite female pop artist, in 1979, she beat Donna Summer and Barbra Streisand. She had unusual range and crossover appeal, and she was iconoclastic in her own way. In her 1977 cover of the Rolling Stones song “Tumbling Dice,” Ronstadt changed the original opening lines—“Women think I’m tasty / But they’re always tryin’ to waste me”—to the following: “People try to rape me / Always think I’m crazy.”
She rose to prominence in the analogue era, when charisma couldn’t be feigned with art-directed Instagram feeds and pitch problems couldn’t be solved with Auto-Tune. Her very distinct voice came out of the Sonoran borderlands, steeped in the ranchera music of her Mexican American upbringing. This is partly why, when she decided to try opera, she could hold her own as Mabel in The Pirates of Penzance. And it’s definitely why her first album of Mexican folk songs, Canciones de Mi Padre, is the biggest-selling non-English album in American history. Her musicianship is legendary even among her fellow legends. In the 2019 documentary about Ronstadt’s life and art, The Sound of My Voice, Dolly Parton describes what it was like to record the Trio collaborations with Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris. “Linda is such a perfectionist,” Parton says. “She’s a pain in the ass sometimes because she is such a perfectionist. She will not have it unless it’s perfect. She used to make me sing those harmonies over and over and over.” I thought of this moment as I sat in Ronstadt’s living room, listening to her perform a diagnostic evaluation on her piano: These are ears so astute they required Dolly Parton to redo tracks.
Ronstadt, now 76, can’t play music on her piano anymore. The disease that took her singing voice in the aughts, a parkinsonism called PSP—short for Progressive Supranuclear Palsy—has since taken her fine motor skills. “My fingers won’t do anything like that,” she tells me. But other people can play her piano, so the piano still gets tuned. (It also gets vacuumed because Ronstadt’s cats deposit fur under the strings.)
I’d come to interview Ronstadt about her new book. Feels Like Home, which will be published on October 4 by Heyday Books, is most easily described as a memoir. It’s not about Ronstadt’s rise to fame or peak rock-star years, though. For that story you would have to read her other memoir, Simple Dreams. This one’s about Lindy, as Ronstadt is known to family—the girl from Tucson who, when the ground got too hot to walk on, would put on her “mud huaraches,” i.e., she’d dip her bare feet in water and dirt over and over until they were caked in clay.
In reality the book is many things at once. It’s a portrait of a place, the Sonoran Desert, and it’s a genealogy of sorts, an archival romp through Ronstadt’s family history. It’s about music: “How a singer is both born and made, learning by singing and being sung to,” in the words of her co-author, the journalist Lawrence Downes. But it’s also about food. Carne seca, for instance—the thin, wide strips of beef that are doused with lime and salt and dried in the sun, a staple of ranches that once had no refrigeration. Or the supersized cheese crisps you find in Tucson, made with extra-large, extra-flaky flour tortillas. Sonoran tortillas.
Feels Like Home includes a bunch of recipes, and our plan is to cook some of them. The next morning I meet Downes, whom I’ve known for more than a decade, at Ronstadt’s place. Her living room is grand and bright, with doors that open onto a garden. Floor-to-ceiling shelves line one side of the room. They’re filled with books and old photos, including one of Ronstadt in a white sundress and what looks to be a vintage chiffon wedding hat, taken by the writer Eve Babitz. “Eve brought the hat,” Ronstadt says. Downes does most of the cooking: Tunapeños, a favorite appetizer of Ronstadt’s, made by hollowing out fresh jalapeños and stuffing them with tuna. (Ronstadt prefers solid white albacore in olive oil.) Machaca—carne seca that’s been pounded or blended into a fibrous fluff, then rehydrated—scrambled with eggs and onion. Tepary beans, a rich, nutty bean that thrives in dry heat and has been cultivated in Arizona since antiquity. And cheese crisps made with real Sonoran tortillas, procured in Tucson by Ronstadt and kept in a freezer out back. (The tortillas must be made with lard.) After lunch, Ronstadt moves to a recliner where she often holds court, and we page through a copy of Feels Like Home.
Image may contain Ray Corrigan
Much of what she knew about her early family history had come from the writings of her grandfather Fred, published posthumously as a memoir, Borderman. That book gives a detailed account of the life of her great-grandfather Friedrich Augustus Ronstadt. How he immigrated to Mexico from Hanover, Germany, in the 1840s. How he served in the Mexican army. How he settled in the Sonoran pueblo of Banámachi. Borderman provides less detail about Ronstadt’s great-grandmother Margarita Redondo and the other women in her family. It became an inexplicit goal of Feels Like Home to fill in these blanks, Downes says—“to elevate and lift out the women in this story.”
To Ronstadt, Margarita had always been a solemn face gazing silently out of old black-and-white photos. Born on the Sonoran frontier, Margarita was 17 when she married Friedrich, a 50-year-old widower with four children. She had seven more children and lost three of them. One baby, Joe, died of a respiratory infection. A five-year-old son, Rodolfo, died of diphtheria. Three-year-old Armando died after he pulled a pot of scalding-hot milk onto himself. Ronstadt had heard that Margarita wrote letters and that some of her letters might have survived. Downes found them in a collection of Ronstadt family papers at the Arizona History Museum. “Her heart practically leaps off these sheets of lined paper,” Ronstadt writes. In one letter sent after Armando died, Margarita relays her torment to her son Fred. “Death would be for me the best possible relief,” she writes. “It takes a piece of my heart that I made the clumsy mistake of leaving the milk where he could reach for it.”
Music was already omnipresent. Even in remote parts of the frontier, Margarita and Friedrich managed to hire piano teachers for their children. “My father was a lover of music and wanted me to start learning it as early as possible,” Fred writes in Borderman. The girls got a musical education too. “All the women in the family were taught to play piano, and they knew operatic arias,” Ronstadt says. “They didn’t sing them like opera singers. They sang them like humans.” Fred was the first Ronstadt to move to Tucson, in 1882. He started the F. Ronstadt Company, a carriage shop that would grow into a hardware store and city landmark. He also cofounded and led Tucson’s first civic orchestra, Club Filarmónico Tucsonense. The military-style brass band played regular concerts downtown and, in 1896, even toured Southern California. Fred played flute and clarinet.
Ronstadt knew both her grandfather Fred and her grandmother Lupe well. She learned a lot more about them when Downes unearthed their early letters. Fred was a 35-year-old widower with four children when he was courting Lupe, then a handsome 21-year-old bookkeeper at his shop. He poured his heart out to her on company stationery. She shut him down. “It seems hardly possible that I should come to think of you in that way,” Lupe wrote, also on F. Ronstadt stationery. Fred composed more love letters and at least one poem. Lupe held firm: “I cannot change my heart. It seems I have no control over it—God alone can do this—I cannot.” They ultimately married, on Valentine’s Day in 1904, but Ronstadt still isn’t sure what caused her grandma’s change of heart. “I’d love to know,” she says. “There’s a photo of her at a picnic with Fred before they were married. She has that look on her face—just twitterpated.”
Ronstadt says her father, Gilbert, could have sung professionally. He had a lovely baritone and performed at the Fox Tucson Theatre in the 1930s as Gil Ronstadt and His Star-Spangled Megaphone. Instead, he helped run the family business. Gilbert always played music, though—“for love, not money,” Ronstadt writes. (He was serenading a girl at the Delta Gamma sorority house, near the University of Arizona campus, when Ronstadt’s mother, Ruth Mary, who also lived at the sorority, first noticed him.) He sang haunting lullabies to Ronstadt and her three siblings, such as “Canto de Cuña,” about a coyote in the sky with silver eyes and feet of mercury.
Ronstadt grew up “saturated in song,” as she puts it. Lalo Guerrero, the father of Chicano music, was a friend of Gilbert’s. Lalo and Gilbert serenaded Ronstadt on her third birthday, “in the Mexican way,” at 2 a.m. She requested “La Burrita,” a song about a little donkey going to the market. Sometimes Ronstadt’s aunt Luisa would come visit. Luisa was a singer and dancer who studied the regional folk music of Spain—“a Mexican Alan Lomax,” Ronstadt writes—and later toured Europe and the U.S. with her show, “Song Pictures of Spain.” She appeared as a Spanish dancer in a 1935 Marlene Dietrich movie, The Devil Is a Woman. In 1946, the year Ronstadt was born, Luisa published a book called Canciones de Mi Padre: Spanish Folksongs from Southern Arizona. Ronstadt never got to see her aunt perform onstage, but when Luisa came to visit, little Linda was enthralled. “She was just enchanting,” Ronstadt says. “She had the most beautiful hands.”
To hear Ronstadt tell it, she and her siblings were basically a free-range, barefoot barbershop quartet. Her older brother, Peter, had an uncanny ear for four-part harmonies. He made sure the other three—Linda, plus her older sister, Suzy, and younger brother, Mike—fell in line. They sang weird songs they learned from their mother. They sang Mexican songs they learned from their father. They sang doo-wop. They sang soap commercials. Linda, Peter, and Suzy even had a folk trio for a while, the New Union Ramblers. But only Linda moved to Los Angeles. Her father was devastated, perhaps because he knew a little about the music business. “If my daughter was going to go into the music business, I’d probably lock her in the closet,” Ronstadt says. “It’s such a hard business. So few people get to have the ride, and the ride is enough to make you crazy.” Gilbert owned a Martin guitar that had been in their family since 1898, given to him decades earlier by his father, Fred. “Now that you own a guitar, you will never be hungry,” Fred told Gilbert at the time. When Linda left home for L.A., in 1965, Gilbert gave the Martin to her.
Ronstadt’s first hit was “Different Drum,” recorded and released in 1967 with her folk band at the time, the Stone Poneys. You’ve heard the song and the irreverent, roller-coastery way Ronstadt belts out the bridge: “Don’t get me wrong / It’s not that I knock it / It’s just that I am not in the market / For a boy who wants to love only me.” The first time her father heard it on the radio, in Tucson, he was shocked. “He thought it was pretty funny,” Ronstadt says. “He used to say, ‘It’s not that I mock it. It’s just that I’m not in the market.’”
Gilbert was more impressed with the Mexican record she made two decades later. By then, Ronstadt was tired of packed arenas, tired of relentless touring, tired of her own hits. She was eager to try something new and dreaming about Mexican music at night. “I just wasn’t getting songs that were as good as the songs I learned as a child,” she says. “I thought they were better songs. They were better constructed. Nicer poetry.” Her label didn’t see dollar signs in archaic music from the ranches of Mexico—“They thought I’d completely lost my mind,” she tells me—but it got behind it anyway.
Before she would record and perform traditional Mexican music, she needed to study its intricacies. Huapangos in particular were formidable, with complicated rhythms and lots of falsetto. She apprenticed with Mariachi Los Camperos de Nati Cano, a well-known group in L.A. The guys in the band were surprised Ronstadt wanted to sing mariachi songs. Nobody was doing that on the world stage, and historically mariachi music was an all-male tradition. “They could have been real defensive and real schmucky, but they were completely willing to help,” she recalls. Los Camperos played on the record, as did Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán, widely considered the best mariachi in the world. To the studio sessions Ronstadt wore a peach-colored rebozo given to her by the Mexican singer Lola Beltrán, a.k.a. Lola la Grande (Lola the Great). Ronstadt borrowed the album title, Canciones de Mi Padre, from her aunt Luisa’s 1946 songbook.
Some white critics regarded Canciones as a radical departure for Ronstadt, seemingly unable to comprehend that she had Mexican roots. “I’d say it in interviews all the time—‘I’m Mexican’—and it was just ignored. Like, ‘You can’t be Mexican. You have a German surname and you’re white as a lily.’” Ronstadt had to explain yet again that Mexico was a melting pot. That one branch of her family tree had been in Mexico since the 1700s. That she didn’t speak Spanish because the pressure to assimilate had led her relatives to drop their native tongue. That she grew up in a place that used to be Mexico, and pretty recently too.
But never mind all that. Canciones was immediately certified double platinum. Planning the tour, Ronstadt again drew inspiration from Luisa and structured her show as a series of vignettes representing different regions in Mexico. Costumes were designed by Manuel Cuevas, the Mexico-born Rhinestone Rembrandt and former lead tailor for Nudie Cohn. Cuevas had made Johnny Cash’s black suits, Elvis’s gold lamé suit, the uniforms worn by the Beatles on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Dwight Yoakam’s bedazzled bolero jacket, and a long list of other iconic looks for Hank Williams, Gene Autry, Bob Dylan, Gram Parsons, and just about everyone in between. For Ronstadt he designed ornate cowgirl jackets, long woolen calvary twill skirts, and custom-stitched boots. Nearly everything was embroidered using Swarovski crystals and shiny thread that, when twisted, caught the light onstage. “He has a jeweler’s eye,” Ronstadt says of Cuevas. “He just glittered like mad.”
Ticket sales were worrisome at first. “We would go to Dallas, say, and think, No one’s coming to this arena,” Ronstadt says. Then the place would be jam-packed with three generations. (The Canciones audience didn’t buy tickets in advance, it turned out.) Ronstadt was thrilled when people showed up with their grandmothers. “We went to the same venues where we played rock and roll, and we had a completely different audience. And they knew the songs. They knew where to yell and scream and where to stay out of your way.”
Downes gets up from a couch next to Ronstadt’s recliner and disappears into the kitchen. He returns with three glasses of homemade agua de tamarindo, one of her favorite drinks. Then we listen to some music. Or try to, at least. The bar is high when Ronstadt is in the room.
Downes puts on “Barrio Viejo,” Lalo Guerrero’s tribute to his old neighborhood in Tucson, a melancholy song about urban renewal and bulldozers and getting old. “Beautiful were the serenades at three o’clock in the morning,” Guerrero sings. Ronstadt sits quietly until it’s over. “The vocal is good, but it’s overwhelmed by the band,” she says at last.
Next we listen to a 2010 recording of Ronstadt singing “A la Orilla de un Palmar” with the Chieftains. Not her favorite vocal performance, it turns out. “This is when I knew I should never go into the studio again,” she says as Downes loads the CD. It sounds great to me. “It’s out of tune,” Ronstadt says. And alone I come and go, like the waves of the sea, she sings toward the end. “Pretty song,” she says. “I didn’t sing it well.”
There is a CD lying around that Ronstadt hasn’t heard yet. It’s an album of new Ronstadt duets made with old tracks—Ronstadt singing in Spanish alongside artists she never recorded with, produced after she sold her catalog. Downes puts on one of the duets, “Quiéreme Mucho.” Initially Ronstadt is singing alone. Then a male voice starts harmonizing with her. “The mix is bad,” Ronstadt says. “Why?!” Downes asks, now laughing. “’Cause it sucks!” she says. She listens a little more. “I can’t bear it.”
Downes turns it off.
“That sounds like it came out of a Cracker Jack box,” she adds.
Downes starts to play her original “Quiéreme Mucho,” the one off her 1992 album Frenesí. But it is an MP3, and that won’t do. “Don’t play that,” she says. “That sounds even worse.” Ronstadt can’t listen to MP3s. They’re too compressed. “You just get a very narrow range of dynamics.”
Ronstadt goes on to say that the problem with the new duet is that the vocals sound as if they are in the back. “They should be right there in your ear,” she says. “Just sitting on your ear, singing to you.”
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Post by the Scribe on Sept 29, 2022 8:31:21 GMT
Read excerpt from Linda Ronstadt’s upcoming book, ‘Feels Like Home’ Heyday Books
Linda Ronstadt will release a new memoir, Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonora Borderlands, on October 4 that focuses on her family connections to the culture and music of the Sonoran Desert region of the American Southwest and Mexico. www.heydaybooks.com/catalog/feels-like-home/
The October/November issue of AARP The Magazine features an excerpt from the book, which was co-written by Ernesto Lechter, along with a brief interview with Ronstadt. www.aarp.org/entertainment/books/info-2022/linda-ronstadt-feels-like-home.html www.aarp.org/entertainment/celebrities/info-2022/linda-ronstadt-interview.html
Linda grew up in Tucson, Arizona, where her family’s home sat on a 10-acre plot that used to be part of a cattle ranch.
“I felt very connected to both my grandparents,” Ronstadt tells the magazine. “We still lived like ranch owners, with horses and chickens. It was their way of life, and it became my way of life too.”
Regarding her attachment to the area, she writes in Feels Like Home, “Wherever I’ve lived, wherever I travel, my soul is always winging it down the road, south over the border, back to my land and my roots in Sonora. I feel the pull like a summons from my father’s parents and their parents and grandparents, from a chain of ancestors, most of whom I never knew.”
Linda also notes, “[M]y sense of connection to my ancestors is strengthened by my own vivid sensory memories of Sonoran things they also knew and loved, particularly those involving music and food.”
The book also features recipes from Ronstadt’s family; the AARP article includes a meatball recipe from Linda’s grandmother.
In conjunction with the book, a companion album that Ronstadt curated titled Feels Like Home: Songs from the Sonoran Borderlands — Linda Ronstadt’s Musical Odyssey will be released this Friday, September 30. For more details, visit Putamayo.com.
www.putumayo.com/feels-like-home
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 1, 2022 6:10:07 GMT
Linda Ronstadt revisits family history and recipes in book ‘Feels Like Home’ www.montereyherald.com/2022/09/30/linda-ronstadt-revisits-family-history-and-recipes-in-book-feels-like-home/ By PETER LARSEN |
PUBLISHED: September 30, 2022 at 4:38 a.m. | UPDATED: September 30, 2022 at 4:40 a.m.
The book is a memoir about a handful of families, including her own, that settled in the Sonoran desert.
Singer Linda Ronstadt’s new book, “Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands,” is part memoir, part cookbook, part natural history, part a few more things, too. It traces the Ronstadt family’s roots in the Sonoran Desert on either side of the Arizona-Mexico border back to the 1800s and explores the beauty and history of the region with help from co-author Lawrence Downes and photographer Bill Steen. (Photo courtesy of Sam Sargent, book image courtesy of Heydey)
Singer Linda Ronstadt initially thought her new book might be a collection of recipes from a trio of Tucson, Arizona families, including her own. www.ocregister.com/linda-ronstadt-can-no-longer-sing-but-the-legendary-vocalist-still-has-plenty-to-say
Her friend CC Goldwater, the granddaughter of the late Arizona senator and presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, came to her with the idea, suggesting it as a project they might do to raise money for research on Parkinson’s disease, which Ronstadt was diagnosed with years ago.
“So I say, ‘Well, I don’t cook. I’m famous for not cooking,’ ” Ronstadt says, laughing. “But we thought we’d try it anyway.”
Ronstadt wanted to include three families with deep roots in the Sonoran desert of Arizona: the Ronstadts, the Goldwaters, and the family of Bill Steen, Ronstadt’s longtime friend. The Steens and Ronstadts had connections that went all the way back to the 1800s.
Ronstadt invited the writer Lawrence Downes to be her co-author and Steen, an acclaimed photographer, to provide the art. They all took a trip across the border to research recipes they might include.
And then, with all those pieces in place, the project ran into reality, Ronstadt says.
“A cookbook wasn’t something that was wanted out there in the publishing world,” she says. “It just didn’t quite come together.”
Which nonetheless worked out just fine in the end.
“Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands,” arrives Tuesday, Oct. 4, written by Ronstadt and Downes with photographs by Steen.
So while it does contain some recipes, most of them reaching back generations, it’s not really a cookbook. Instead, “Feels Like Home” is a memoir with food and a travel book about a handful of families. Ronstadt is at the book’s center, providing a deep understanding of what life was like for those hardy people who settled in the Sonoran desert many years ago, as well as the Indigenous people who lived there for centuries longer.
Tracing the roots
“I wanted to write it about a single region, which is the Sonoran Desert,” says Ronstadt, 76, from her home in the Bay Area. “It’s very much its own place like Patagonia. And it exists on both sides of the border, so it’s a both-sides-of-the-border story.
“That’s what the book came out of,” she says. “It was our running the road up and down.”
It also a deeper dive into the Ronstadt family history than she’d ever taken before.
With Downes’ research skills, she found letters in the Arizona Historical Society that her great-grandmother Margarita Redondo Ronstadt wrote in the 1880s from her home on the Mexican side of the border to her son – Ronstadt’s grandfather Federico “Fred” Ronstadt – after he moved to Tucson at the age of 14 to apprentice in a carriage shop.
And later, the book shares Fred’s love letters to Ronstadt’s grandmother Lupe Dalton, full of passion and frustration at Lupe’s reluctance to return his feelings, though in time she did.
“I was so shocked because they were such an ideal couple,” Ronstadt says. “My grandmother lived to be 96. My grandfather lived to be 84 or 86. And they were very loving always and very considerate to each other and enjoyed their family.
“Boy, maybe she had some high school crush that she was hoping she wouldn’t have to marry him,” she says.
Food and family
Many of the recipes in the book will be familiar to anyone who’s lived in the Sonoran Desert or even eaten in Southwestern or Mexican restaurants in the region.
Many are simple dishes such as carne con chile or Sonoran enchiladas. Some are less so, such as El Minuto’s cheese crisps, Tepary beans, or albondigas de la Familia Ronstadt – Ronstadt Family Meatballs.
Food, she writes in the book, was always a way for families to spend time together and show love for each other. Especially on the daylong picnics her extended family often took, as was customary for most who lived there at the time.
Asked what she remembers most of those days, she says “the camaraderie, us around the fire.”
“You know, my Dad was cooking and my brother would be helping him,” Ronstadt says. “And my mom would be bringing beans and tortillas out from the kitchen. We had someone that lived in our house that made those beautiful big tortillas. They’re made by hand, they’re very labor intensive and they taste like nothing else.
“I grew up eating those kinds of tortillas,” she says. “And I think food is important in every culture. It’s central. It’s central to every culture. So that was our style.”
Desert beauty
Other chapters in the book explore her memories and the broader history of the desert and its people from the present to the far past, with photographs by Steen that capture in beautiful color a desert landscape little changed over time.
“It’s a ferocious beauty,” Ronstadt says of the desert. “My dad was very visually inclined, very inclined to visual art. He was a good singer, but he was really a good watercolorist. And he painted the desert all the time.
“He could see it, you know, and he’d point it out,” she says of the region’s natural beauty. “We grew up with that awareness of beauty. My mother would just run outside and look at the mountains when it was sunset and the mountains all turned pink. It was quite a show.
“We grew up taking it for granted, but we loved it,” Ronstadt says. “Just like I feel the same way about water. We had a well on our property. We had real sweet water. And I remember sticking my face in the irrigation ditch and it was cold, and I thought, I’m gonna miss this someday.
“And boy, do I miss it living in California in the drought,” she says.
Desert without borders
People lived in the Sonoran Desert long before there was a border drawn to separate the United States from Mexico, a point Ronstadt emphasizes by tracing her family’s history on both sides of that manmade line.
“The desert is beautiful until it has fascist geometry put on it,” Ronstadt says. “Nature hates perfect geometry. It likes random asymmetry. So the day you start putting fences in and building in a straight line a desert turns into a wasteland.”
Born in Tucson in 1946, Ronstadt remembers how little the border mattered on trips between countries when she was a child.
“We used to drive to the border town, which takes about an hour,” she says. “We’re used to go down and shop and have lunch and just drive back home. It was like driving to the beach in Los Angeles if you lived in Hollywood.
“We knew the people down there,” Ronstadt says. “We knew their families. We knew the ranches. My dad knew the ranchers because he sold equipment to them.
“It was a real hospitality like nothing else, and it wasn’t a big deal,” she says. “To get back across, it didn’t take hours. Now, it’s just a nightmare. You go across the border you might as well plan to stay the night because you’re going to be half the day the next day getting back.”
The fence that the United States has built along stretches of its Southern border prompts disdain for its interruption of the landscape and its impact on all living creatures who cross it.
“The fence is a joke because people cut through the fence, they dig under the fence,” Ronstadt says. “And most people who come in (illegally) come in on planes legally and then they overstay their visa.
“It’s not doing anything to help the immigration problem except make criminals out of children that they take away from their families. Do such trauma to them that God knows how they’re gonna survive.”
Mas canciones: more songs
There is music throughout the chapters as befits a book written by a singer who is in the Rock Hall of Fame but has also been honored by institutions as varied as the Academy of Country Music and the Latin Grammys for her work in those genres.
A musical soundtrack to the book, “Feels Like Home: Songs from the Sonoran Borderlands—Linda Ronstadt’s Musical Odyssey,” will be released by the Putamayo record label on Friday, Sept. 30.
But the book also includes a final chapter with a do-it-yourself playlist with categories such as Songs We Ronstadts Loved and Sang or Songs of Mexico and the Borderlands.
“There were some that I remember from earliest childhood on,” Ronstadt says of the songs she presents in this chapter, each with a short description of how it connected with her, her family, friends or the region.
“A trio style that my sister and brother used to sing,” she says. “I recorded some of it on the second album, ‘Mas Canciones,’ that I made. I included two trios by me and my two brothers. They were just some that we loved.”
Ronstadt last sang in public in 2009, the effects of her illness depriving her of the clear, beautiful voice loved by many. Still, there are memories in the songs that exist, and those she writes about here.
“You remember all the times you sat together and sang them,” she says. “When you were 14, when you’re 18, and when you were 50.
“And now we’re all geezers, you know, and we can’t sing anymore,” she says, and laughs.
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 1, 2022 6:53:45 GMT
www.putumayo.com/feels-like-home
Featured Video
Feels Like Home: Linda Ronstadt's Musical Odyssey - Los Cenzontles "Palomas Que Andan Volando"
Putumayo World Music 91 views Sep 30, 2022
An uplifting musical journey through songs that inspired Linda Ronstadt curated by Linda and Putumayo to accompany her memoir Feels Like Home. Featuring legends and musical explorers like Lalo Guerrero, Linda Ronstadt, Ry Cooder, Jackson Browne, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Taj Mahal, David Hidalgo and more. Learn more at www.putumayo.com/feels-like-home.
Los Cenzontles recorded this version of the classic ranchera “Palomas Que Andan Volando” (Pigeons That Are Flying) as a tribute to legendary Mexican singers Antonio Aguilar and Flor Silvestre. The lyrics are sung from the perspective of a prisoner in a Guadalajara jail who longs for the pigeons who bring news of his loved ones. “How sad my life is / Without hope and with no one / Crying over my sorrow and pain / And remembering my mother.”
About the Album
On September 30th, Putumayo will release Feels Like Home: Songs from the Sonoran Borderlands—Linda Ronstadt’s Musical Odyssey, a musical accompaniment to the acclaimed singer’s new book, Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands, published by Heyday Books. The musical collection was co-curated by Ronstadt and Putumayo founder Dan Storper and includes influential songs from her childhood and career, as well as several of her own interpretations of classic Mexican songs. Participating artists include legends and musical explorers Lalo Guerrero, Ry Cooder, Jackson Browne, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Neil Young, Taj Mahal and David Hidalgo. The CD package will include an album download card and informative booklet with an introduction by Linda. The album will also be available for download and streaming on major platforms.
The featured songs on the musical collection are an excellent companion and illustrate the influences that helped mold Linda Ronstadt into the artist she became. Lalo Guerrero, known as the “father of Chicano Music” would often visit his good friend, Linda’s father, Gilbert, early in Linda’s life, teaching her and her siblings traditional Mexican songs. Here, in collaboration with Ry Cooder, Guerrero sings “Barrio Viejo,” a poignant song he wrote about the loss of old neighborhoods and ways of life.
For Ronstadt, her home has always been a place of creativity and she is joined by her brothers, Peter and Mike, to sing the lovelorn “El Sueño.” Roots music revivalists Los Cenzontles follow with the Mexican folk song, “Palomas Que Andan Volando” (Pigeons That Are Flying). The ever-musical Ronstadt family continues to shine with “Canadian Moon,” a previously unreleased version by Ronstadt family members known as P.D. Ronstadt & The Co.
The underlying story Ronstadt expresses in her book and this collection is illustrated in several of the featured songs. The Sonoran region was long home to Indigenous people, Mexicans and Southwesterners who lived and worked in close proximity. Several songs demonstrate the importance of cultural openness and acceptance rather than living in fear of our neighbors to the South. “Across the Border” is both a love song and a voyage of escape by Linda Ronstadt with Emmylou Harris. Their rendition of this Bruce Springsteen composition features another legend, Neil Young, on harmonica. Jackson Browne’s “The Dreamer” featuring Los Cenzontles, tells a sobering story of a family divided by the border and unjust immigration laws. Los Cenzontles return with “Naninan Upirin,” sung in the indigenous language P’urhépecha and showcasing the distinct folk music tradition of this ancient people and their culture.
The sweetly melancholic Appalachian folk song “I Never Will Marry,” performed by Linda Ronstadt with Dolly Parton, fits in well with the broken-hearted Mexican ballads that accompany it. After a sweeping tour of the music of Mexico and the borderlands which inspired her, “Piel Canela” sees Linda and her band interpreting another Latin musical style that was ever-present in her childhood home: Cuban mambo. The collection concludes with a final offering from Los Cenzontles, joined by David Hidalgo (of Los Lobos) and folk and blues icon Taj Mahal, who perform “Voy Caminando” about a young migrant’s journey towards his dream.
Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands is a fascinating memoir of Linda’s growing up in the culturally rich Sonoran borderlands of the Southwest. Together, the book and this album evoke the magical panorama of the Sonoran desert and offer a personal tour of the memories and music of the region where Linda Ronstadt came of age. The book, written by Ronstadt and Lawrence Downes with photographs by Bill Steen, can be found at fine bookstores everywhere, online and by visiting heydaybooks.com.
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 1, 2022 7:04:57 GMT
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 2, 2022 14:58:52 GMT
Linda Ronstadt can’t stand ‘boring writing’ www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/linda-ronstadt-can-e2-80-99t-stand-e2-80-98boring-writing-e2-80-99/ar-AA12pxnK Amy Sutherland - Thursday
Linda Ronstadt had a fantastically musical successful career though she often did what everyone told her not to: mix genres. The rock singer embraced a long list of musical styles, from traditional Mexican music to operetta. “Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderland,” her new book with co-author Lawrence Downes, follows a similar genre-defying path. It’s a travelogue, a memoir, a family history, a photo study, and a cookbook that will transport you to the vast dessert that links Arizona and Mexico. It’s as hard to categorize as Ronstadt herself. bookshop.org/a/8899/9781597145794
Singer Linda Ronstadt is the author of “Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderland.” © Sam Sargent
BOOKS: What are you reading?
RONSTADT: I just finished Victoria Finlay’s “Fabric.” She’s an anthropologist writing on the history of fabric. It’s just wonderful writing and great information. It turns out most pashmina is fake. bookshop.org/a/8899/9781639361632
BOOKS: Is that a typical read for you?
RONSTADT: I have a pile of books here on my nightstand. I have “Vagina Obscura” by Rachel E. Gross, which is really good. I read “White Girls” by Hilton Als. I’ve never read anything like it. I also read Colm Tóibín’s “The Magician.” I picked it up because I thought it was a biography of Thomas Mann, one of my favorite writers. It turned out to be a novelization of Mann’s life. Tóibín’s research is so thorough and his writing is so good it was like watching a great biopic. bookshop.org/a/8899/9781324006312 bookshop.org/a/8899/9780143134756 bookshop.org/a/8899/9781476785097
BOOKS: What are your favorite Mann novels?
RONSTADT: I love “Buddenbrooks.” My friend Kenny Edwards who was in my band recommended “The Magic Mountain,” which I read twice. I started with “Death in Venice” because it is his shortest novel but I couldn’t get into it. Maybe I could now. I understand Thomas Mann a little better. bookshop.org/a/8899/9780679752608 bookshop.org/a/8899/9781400044214 bookshop.org/a/8899/9780141181738
BOOKS: How do you pick what you read?
RONSTADT: I get a lot of recommendations from NPR and the New York Times. My friend the writer John Rockwell recommended Benoit Mandelbrot’s “The Fractalist,” which is a book about fractal geometry, to me. I didn’t know anything about math. Now I can recognize things that are the products of fractal geometry, but I don’t really understand fractal geometry. Probably only ten people in the world do. bookshop.org/a/8899/9780307389916
BOOKS: How would you describe your taste in books?
RONSTADT: I can’t stand boring writing. I don’t care about surfing but I read a book about it, William Finnegan’s “Barbarian Days,” because the writing is so good. bookshop.org/a/8899/9780143109396
BOOKS: Has your taste changed over the years?
RONSTADT: I hardly ever read modern fiction, I’m sorry to say. I wouldn’t have bought “The Magician” if I’d known it was a novel. I like Henry James, Edith Wharton, and the classic Russian novelists. Dickens is tedious to me but I don’t dislike him like I dislike Ernest Hemmingway. I don’t like a lot of French stuff but I did like Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary.” I haven’t read Proust. Maybe I will now that I’m 76. I doubt it. bookshop.org/a/8899/9780143106494
BOOKS: What was the last classic that you read?
RONSTADT: I read “The Age of Innocence” over and over. I went over to visit the Arion Press here in San Francisco, and they had made a hand-printed edition of it, which I bought. It’s beautiful. I could lick it. bookshop.org/a/8899/9780140189704
BOOKS: What is your taste in nonfiction?
RONSTADT: I like to read stuff about volcanoes, waves, or wind. My favorite nonfiction writer is John McPhee. He’s so precise and so specific. My favorite of his is “The Curve of Binding Energy.” It’s about physics, which I don’t understand, but his writing is so charming. bookshop.org/a/8899/9780374515980
BOOKS: Did any of your reading influence you as a musician?
RONSTADT: I think everything you read and see informs your music. People always ask me for advice about becoming a professional musician. I tell them every city you go to go to their museums. Read as much as you can, especially if you are a songwriter. People like Paul Simon have read everything.
BOOKS: What are your reading habits?
RONSTADT: My mind wanders a lot but I can read for a long time. I like reading in the morning best, but read in the afternoon before a nap and at night before bed. I didn’t have a television for 30 years and I read so much then. When Obama was elected I had to keep going over to my friends to see him speak. So I got a television. It cut my reading in half. I discovered the Home Renovation channel.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Follow us on Facebook or Twitter @globebiblio. Amy Sutherland is the author, most recently, of “Rescuing Penny Jane” and she can be reached at amysutherland@mac.com. bookshop.org/a/8996/9780062377258
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 4, 2022 7:16:17 GMT
For Her Swan Song, Linda Ronstadt Turns to Recipes / In “Feels Like Home,” the singer, her voice taken by Parkinson’s, tells her story through the border dishes of her Arizona youth. www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/dining/linda-ronstadt-recipes.html?searchResultPosition=2 Oct. 3, 2022
For Her Swan Song, Linda Ronstadt Turns to Recipes
In “Feels Like Home,” the singer, her voice taken by Parkinson’s, tells her story through the border dishes of her Arizona youth. By KIM SEVERSON
Kim Severson, who writes about the nation’s food culture, traveled to Tucson, Ariz., and spent two days with Linda Ronstadt and her family exploring the food of the Sonoran desert.
Linda Ronstadt, once the highest paid woman in rock, is famous for a lot of things. Her high-fidelity voice earned her 11 Grammy Awards for songs like “You’re No Good” and “Blue Bayou.” She had a killer run on Broadway and put mariachi music on the charts. Both President Obama and Kermit the Frog had crushes on her.
One thing she is especially famous for among her family and friends is not cooking, even though one of her grandfathers invented the electric stove and the other was a master of meat and mesquite.
That particular hole in her skill set makes it even more curious that Ms. Ronstadt, 76, has written a cookbook. But “Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands,” published by California’s Heyday press on Oct. 4, is a way to explain why the arid land that starts in Arizona and stretches into Mexico’s west coast is her foothold in the world.
It’s a story she has told through music, and now wants to tell — as much as she can — through food. Except there is that troubling bit about cooking. She just never really learned how.
“I like being around it, but I’m not a good multitasker,” she explained one recent afternoon as we relaxed in her suite at the Arizona Inn, the historic hotel where she camps out on the increasingly rare trips she takes from her home in San Francisco to her hometown.
Besides, she said, “it’s hard to find a stove and pans in a hotel.” Ms. Ronstadt had saved learning to cook as a retirement project.
“I didn’t know I was going to get this disease,” she said.
In 2013, Ms. Ronstadt announced that for years she had been struggling with a form of Parkinson’s. Her singing career was over. For a musician who Dolly Parton said was “a pain in the ass sometimes because she is such a perfectionist,” performing with a compromised voice wouldn’t do.
It turns out that Ms. Ronstadt’s exacting approach to musicianship extends to food. She believes broccoli should steam for precisely 3 minutes and vinaigrette should never be made with balsamic. She can go deep on the benefits of no-till farming and the cultural significance of the hit culinary series “The Bear.”
“Chefs are going to get laid a lot more now,” she said. “They’re like lead guitar players.”
On her birthday, Ms. Ronstadt always heads to the Hayes Street Grill in San Francisco for a hot fudge sundae with whipped cream, no nuts. She likes to host Sunday brunch at her Dutch colonial house near the Presidio. The table is set with antique silver she’s been collecting since her days on the road. It’s prepared by Jon Campbell, a former Chez Panisse cook, who says she is a tough but fair critic. “I don’t think she likes a lot of noise in her food,” he said.
It’s not that she has never cooked. She once had an electric frying pan that told her exactly which temperature to use for pancakes and fried chicken. She liked to bake fruit pies, practicing for a week if someone was coming to dinner.
Eating meals together at a proper table has always been important. She made sure her two children, whom she adopted as newborns when she was in her 40s, started the day at a table set with cloth napkins, even though someone else cooked breakfast.
Her daughter, Mary Clementine, who moved in to help as the disease progressed, said she and her brother laughed out loud when their mother told them she was working on a cookbook.
“It will have four pages: P. B. And. J.,” she said.
Peanut butter sandwiches with jelly or honey were such a mainstay when she was touring that Neil Young, whom she opened for in the 1970s, still teases her about it by sending texts that just say “peanut butter.”
Of course, Ms. Ronstadt is specific about how to make one: Begin by spreading soft, whole wheat bread with butter and use only crunchy Laura Scudder’s peanut butter.
Her favorite style of cuisine is something she calls “hippy health food,” but lately she has been thinking a lot about the Sonoran style of Mexican food she grew up on. She included some of her favorites in the book, like caldo de queso, with its clear broth and glistening cubes of cheese, and Sonoran enchiladas built from thick, fried corn tortillas.
The book has recipes for ancient desert food, like long-simmered tepary beans, and some only-in-Tucson dishes, like cheese crisp, the late-night snack she used to get at El Minuto, a restaurant across the street from the building where her brother once worked as the chief of police.
She came from a family that loved to eat, so the book includes some Ronstadt family favorites, including albóndigas, the spiced meatballs poached in water, and a quirky, modern concoction called tunapeños — essentially jalapeño peppers halved and stuffed with tuna salad.
The book devotes four pages to tortillas de agua: a Sonoran staple made with wheat flour, water, salt and a touch of lard or shortening spun into a flaky, nearly translucent tortilla larger than a steering wheel.
“They mean home,” she said.
In all, there are just 20 recipes. The rest of the book is a braid of stories about her family and the history, politics and music of the bicultural borderland that she loves.
“Think of it as a road trip with Linda Ronstadt through the part of the world where she is from and loves the most,” said Lawrence Downes, the journalist who co-wrote the book with her and who Ms. Ronstadt says did the heavy lifting.
Although she is an avid reader and analytical thinker, “I’ve never researched anything professionally in my life,” she said. Ms. Ronstadt and Mr. Downes first met when he was researching traditional Mexican music. They spoke again when he wanted her perspective on immigration, an issue she is passionate about. In 2013, the pair took a road trip from Tucson to Banámichi, the Sonoran town where her paternal grandfather lived as a boy before he immigrated to Tucson and built the family hardware business. It became a travel story for The New York Times, where Mr. Downes was employed as an editor and editorial writer.
The cookbook was an idea from her friend CC Goldwater, whose grandfather Barry Goldwater, the Republican U.S. Senator from Arizona and presidential nominee, happened to have a famous chili recipe. Ms. Goldwater imagined the book as a fund-raiser for Parkinson’s research based on recipes from three Arizona families: the Ronstadts, the Goldwaters and Bill and Athena Steen, old friends who have made a name teaching people how to build houses from adobe and straw bales at their rural compound near Canelo, a shadow of a town about 10 miles from the Mexican border.
Group cookbook projects can become unwieldy. In the end, Ms. Ronstadt’s life became the focus and Mr. Steen contributed the photographs.
Because Ms. Ronstadt can’t type anymore and mobility is difficult, it fell to Mr. Downes to channel her voice based on dozens of conversations and to test the recipes — no easy feat, given that Ms. Ronstadt, by her own admission, is hard to please.
Take the bread recipe they wanted to include. To pass time during long, tedious recording sessions, she would bake bread in the studio kitchen based on a recipe she studied in the Fannie Farmer cookbook.
“I’d mix it up and let the sponge rise while they adjusted the mics or whatever needed to happen then go sing some vocals,” she said.
Mr. Downes tried eight different times to get the loaf just right, using molasses, honey and whole wheat flour as she suggested. It was impossible.
“She remembered it as more seven grainy so we just said, ‘Ah, screw it,’” he said.
Mr. Downes joined us for a night in Tucson, where Katya Peterson had invited us to dinner. She is a childhood friend, and the first person Ms. Ronstadt calls when she is in town. Ms. Peterson, an enthusiastic and civic-minded woman who lived for many years in New York, coordinated a meal from food harvested at Mission Garden, a plot of land whose crops represent more than 4,000 years of continuous cultivation in the Tucson Basin. A fig tree stewarded by the Ronstadt family grows there, as well as cactus samples collected from the land where Ms. Ronstadt’s grandfather was born.
Dinner parties are not easy. “I’m finding it harder and harder as I get older and deafer to hold conversations,” she said. Her once reliable appetite has faded and the edges of flavors seem filed down.
At the table, Ms. Ronstadt asked for extra salsa and sprinkled a bit of the intense, indigenous chiltepin pepper on a stew made with 60-day corn and a squash called ha:l, both of which the Tohono O’odham people have grown for centuries. She was happy to see a big pitcher of agua de tamarindo on the table. Her grandfather loved the drink, and there’s a recipe for it in the book.
Ms. Ronstadt took a sip and told me it was too tart. While delivering a small tutorial on all the things that can be made with the agave plant, she sweetened her drink with syrup made from agave grown at Mission Garden and squeezed in some lime, then instructed me to do the same.
“When it’s right, it’s so thirst quenching,” she said. “You feel it on the back of your throat. I can drink gallons of this.”
The next morning, we climbed into a van with her daughter, her longtime assistant and a bunch of young Ronstadt relatives to visit the Steens at their compound in tiny Canelo, where her talented niece and nephew sang some old family Mexican songs and a few Ms. Ronstadt had made hits.
Mr. Steen had invited Lupita Madero Ramirez, a friend’s daughter from Mexico, to cook carne con chile and the wild greens called quelites. She taught us how to pat and spin tortillas de agua until they stretched from the wrist to the shoulder. Someone handed Ms. Ronstadt one hot off the comal, slathered in butter.
Did it taste like home? It did, she said.
But then she couldn’t help herself.
“They’re better with less butter.”
Linda Ronstadt is most at home in the Sonoran desert at places like a friend’s house in the tiny town of Canelo, Arizona.
Longtime friends Bill and Athena Steen invited Ms. Ronstadt and a crowd of old friends and family to their compound 10 miles north of the Mexican border for a day of eating and singing.
Ms. Ronstadt said her co-author, the New York journalist Lawrence Downes, did all the heavy lifting on the new book. He escorted her into the Tucson restaurant El Minuto.
Ms. Ronstadt enjoyed a dinner made from food grown at Tucson’s Mission Garden and prepared in the home of her close childhood friend Katya Peterson and her husband, Pierre Landau.
Ms. Ronstadt shared some flour tortillas in Canelo, Ariz., with Deb and Dennis Moroney, ranchers who raise grass-fed Criollo cattle and Navajo Churro sheep.
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 4, 2022 8:22:37 GMT
Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands Hardcover – October 4, 2022 www.amazon.com/Feels-Like-Home-Sonoran-Borderlands/dp/1597145793 by Linda Ronstadt (Author), Lawrence Downes (Author), Bill Steen (Photographer)
Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Linda Ronstadt takes readers on a journey to the place her soul calls home, the Sonoran Desert, in this candid new memoir.
In Feels Like Home, Grammy award-winning singer Linda Ronstadt effortlessly evokes the magical panorama of the high desert, a landscape etched by sunlight and carved by wind, offering a personal tour built around meals and memories of the place where she came of age. Growing up the granddaughter of Mexican immigrants and a descendant of Spanish settlers near northern Sonora, Ronstadt’s intimate new memoir celebrates the marvelous flavors and indomitable people on both sides of what was once a porous border whose denizens were happy to exchange recipes and gather around campfires to sing the ballads that shaped Ronstadt’s musical heritage. Following her bestselling musical memoir, Simple Dreams, this book seamlessly braids together Ronstadt’s recollections of people and their passions in a region little understood in the rest of the United States. This road trip through the desert, written in collaboration with former New York Times writer Lawrence Downes and illustrated throughout with beautiful photographs by Bill Steen, features recipes for traditional Sonoran dishes and a bevy of revelations for Ronstadt’s admirers. If this book were a radio signal, you might first pick it up on an Arizona highway, well south of Phoenix, coming into the glow of Ronstadt’s hometown of Tucson. It would be playing something old and Mexican, from a time when the border was a place not of peril but of possibility.
Editorial Reviews Review "[Feels Like Home] is most easily described as a memoir. […] In reality the book is many things at once. It’s a portrait of a place, the Sonoran Desert, and it’s a genealogy of sorts, an archival romp through Ronstadt’s family history. It’s about music: 'How a singer is both born and made, learning by singing and being sung to,' in the words of her co-author, the journalist Lawrence Downes. But it’s also about food."—Vogue
" travelogue, a memoir, a family history, a photo study, and a cookbook that will transport you to the vast dessert that links Arizona and Mexico."—Boston Globe
" celebration of culture, music, geography, food and family ties that know no borders. It is eloquently told by a singer who has devoted much of her career to transcending musical borders […] [Ronstadt's] memoir is a valentine to her family and the Mexican heritage she has long celebrated in words and music."—San Diego Union-Tribune
"Illuminates the culture, food and natural wonders of the Sonoran Desert, which stretches from [Ronstadt's] Arizona childhood home through a large swatch of northern Mexico."—Parade
"Feels Like Home is a memoir with food and a travel book about a handful of families. Ronstadt is at the book’s center, providing a deep understanding of what life was like for those hardy people who settled in the Sonoran desert many years ago, as well as the Indigenous people who lived there for centuries longer."—Orange County Register
“ very sweet-hearted book [...] it hits a lot of sweet spots for what is kind of the perfect coffee table book.”—Mark Athitakis, KJZZ Radio, Phoenix
“Feels Like Home invites us on an exquisite journey of beauty, adventure and history. It’s a magical trip you don’t want to miss. This book will fill your heart, your soul and your spirit. We need that now more than ever.”—Dolores Huerta, labor organizer and civil-rights activist
“Feels Like Home is personal and revealing—with vivid portraits of her forebears who immigrated first to Northern Mexico and then Tucson, Arizona, with striking photographs, family letters, and an array of recipes and songs, she weaves together an unforgettable tale of her life and talented musical family. This is quintessentially an American story—touching, and well worth reading.”—Jerry Brown, former governor of California
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 4, 2022 12:35:12 GMT
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 5, 2022 12:59:17 GMT
Linda Ronstadt Talks Heritage, the Immigration Crisis, and the Return of Joni Mitchell www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a41507009/linda-ronstadt-feels-like-home-interview/
With her new book, Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands, out today, the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer opens up about revisiting her roots.
By Alan LightPUBLISHED: OCT 4, 2022
“There’s been prejudice against Mexico ever since the United States stole it in 1846,” says Linda Ronstadt. “We forget that Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, California, they were all parts of Mexico. It’s a huge swath of land, and it was taken unfairly by the Americans. So, the Mexicans who stayed didn't migrate—the border migrated.”
The Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, granddaughter of Mexican immigrants and descendant of Spanish settlers, explores her family history and the complicated relationship between the US and Mexico in her new book, Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands. Co-written with former New York Times editor Lawrence Downes, it’s filled with traditional Sonoran and southern Arizona recipes, traditional song lyrics (there’s a companion playlist), and evocative photos by her friend Bill Steen.
But this territory isn’t new for Ronstadt; it’s something she’s consistently been examining at least since her groundbreaking 1987 album Canciones de Mi Padre. A collection of traditional Mexican songs was an unprecedented move for a star of her stature at the time, but it went on to become the biggest-selling foreign language album of all time and was followed up with two more albums of Latin music, Mas Canciones and Frenesi.
She wrote about her family in her 2013 memoir, Simple Dreams, and after her 2019 Grammy-winning biographical documentary The Sound of My Voice, she released a companion film, Linda and the Mockingbirds, which chronicled a trip she took with a busload of schoolchildren to the small Mexican town where her grandfather was born. www.amazon.com/dp/B000002GVQ?linkCode=ogi&tag=esquire_auto-append-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10054.a.41507009%5Bsrc%7C%5Bch%7C%5Blt%7Csale
All this work, of course, has come during a time of increasing tension and political grandstanding over immigration. But Tucson-born Ronstadt points out that her own roots run deep in both countries. “My family has been very happily existing on both sides of the border since the early 1800s,” she says, on the phone from her home in San Francisco. “Actually, longer than that, because the original ancestor came in the 1500s. We've been there longer than anybody but the native Mexicans, the Native Americans”
What you might never know from reading Feels Like Home is that Linda Ronstadt was one of the biggest rock stars of her time, selling more than 100 million albums and winning 12 Grammy awards. Considered by many to have the best pure voice of her generation, her work was staggering in its range, encompassing everything from country to American standards to light opera, in addition to introducing many listeners to such songwriters as Warren Zevon and Elvis Costello.
Yet she shrugs off her fame and even the caliber of her singing. “I always had a real problem with phrasing,” she says. “I don’t like the way I phrase a lot of stuff. I hear my records and I go ‘Oh, my God, I can't believe I did that.’ “
Ronstadt, 76, announced her retirement in 2011 and revealed shortly afterwards that she is no longer able to sing as a result of Parkinson’s Disease; she was later re-diagnosed with a similar condition, progressive supranuclear palsy. But in the book and in conversation, her continuing love for the music and culture she grew up with shines through.
Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands www.amazon.com/dp/1597145793?linkCode=ogi&tag=esquire_auto-append-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10054.a.41507009%5Bsrc%7C%5Bch%7C%5Blt%7Csale Now 10% Off $32 AT AMAZON
“I've been singing since I was three,” she says. “So, some of these Mexican songs are deeply personal for me, sacred to my family. We had a picnic, a pachanga we call it, where you cook outside and sit outside. And my family was there singing, four or five generations, and we all still do the same songs.
“I can't sing at all anymore, my voice has tanked. But we’ve got a lot of different good voices in the family, from soprano to bass. And when they sing, I have to put on a harmony—even if it’s just in my brain, I hear where I fit.”
Esquire: You've revisited the history of your family and of the Sonoran region multiple times. Why is it important to you to continue to tell this story?
Linda Ronstadt: Because people need to know what it's like in Mexico. They need to know what the people are like. They're extraordinary in this particular valley. An American cowboy who wants to be a rancher buys 1000 acres of land, but out in the middle of nowhere, and they're not part of a community. Their life is lonely, kids are bored, whatever. They don't get to see other people unless they drive miles into town. But in Mexico, they make a village, and they share the grasslands. You help each other with everything you do—if your roof needs fixing, or you need a new house put up, your neighbors will all help you. It's a very cooperative society, and it’s been kept away from other evil things. If you get a flat tire, someone will pull over and help you and take you an hour away to buy a tire and back. But if you break down on the California freeway, they’ll run over you.
The Canciones de Mi Padre album was such a pivot point in your career and your relationship to your heritage. How difficult was it to get that record made and what did it mean for you to do it at the time?
The record company, of course, didn't want the record. And my manager thought I was committing career suicide. They just couldn’t hear it, it was like birds chirping in the wind, but I could hear the music. So I set myself to learning the music up to a better standard.
My manager, Peter Asher, to his credit really got behind me. He thought I was crazy, but he produced the album, and he did a good job. And same with my record company. They went along with it. I’d made a bunch of hit records, and the record I made with Nelson Riddle [What’s New in 1983, the first of a trilogy with the legendary arranger] wasn't supposed to be a hit and it was, so I’d earned the right. I just went into the studio and started cutting old Mexican songs—it seemed perfectly logical to me!
In the book, you write powerfully about going to visit refugee centers and migrant camps. We're back in an election season with a lot of focus around immigration issues. What do you hear in this latest version of that debate?
Well, put it this way: I've read quite a lot of German history, especially around the Weimar Republic, and when the person who used to be President came down his escalator—so grandiose and so stupid—and said that Mexicans were rapists and murderers, I thought, this is the Weimar Republic, he’s Hitler and the Mexicans are the new Jews. He’s taking advantage of people that are ignorant and don’t know any better and convincing them that Mexico is responsible for their problems. That’s why they can’t get a date, or they failed to go to school so they can only earn substandard wages.
You’ve seen this your whole life. Is it anything new, or is it just a game plan that still works?
That game plan works like a charm. But we're all just people, we have the same needs and desires, to live and thrive. There's been a drought in Mexico, a terrible drought like we have in California. People are desperate. Nobody really wants to leave their home unless they live in a floodplain. They don’t want to leave their home and their family and their friends and come to a strange place that’s hostile to them. That's not the attraction. The attraction is, I need to go north or I starve. I have to go and send money back to my family so they won't starve.
Ronstadt in 1968. Palo Verde High School Concert. The last as The Stone Poneys Richard Weize//Getty Images
These last few years, there have been a number of documentaries and books about the Laurel Canyon scene where you started. Did you watch any of those?
I didn't see the Laurel Canyon one. I don't know what streaming channel to get it on. I didn't have a TV for 30 years. and finally, when President Obama was elected, I said “I have to get a TV so I can see his speeches without having to go to a friend’s house to watch.” I don't know how to work a television—I think you have to get a 13-year-old for that.
Why do you think there’s still such a fascination with that place and time?
I think people like their grandparents’ music. I liked my grandma’s music. It might be genetic, I don't know. I think there was a lot of quality that came out of the Laurel Canyon scene. Neil Young and Crosby, Stills and Nash. Joni Mitchell by herself would have put it on the map.
Did you see Joni’s performance at the Newport Folk Festival?
I watched it on YouTube. She’s obviously vocally impaired, but she’s still a great singer, still a great songwriter. I liken it to a ruin, a beautiful ruin. In her position, I wouldn’t have done the same thing, but I understand why she did. It was inspiring to see generations of kids up there with her, all influenced by her music.
In interviews and in your books, you often seem reluctant to talk about your own celebrity and success.
Most important is the work. I know what I did well and what I didn’t do as well. The rest is just noise in the background.
ALAN LIGHT Author and music journalist Alan Light is the former Editor-in-Chief of Vibe and Spin magazines, and hosts the daily music talk show "Feedback" on SiriusXM.
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 5, 2022 13:30:21 GMT
'My Sonoran Desert': Linda Ronstadt on how Arizona borderlands culture shaped her new book www.azcentral.com/story/entertainment/music/2022/10/04/linda-ronstadt-2022-book/8141191001/ Ed Masley Arizona Republic
gallery www.azcentral.com/picture-gallery/entertainment/movies/2019/09/11/photos-linda-ronstadt-sound-my-voice/2272723001/
Linda Ronstadt's second memoir, "Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands," could just as easily have been a cookbook. www.azcentral.com/story/entertainment/music/2018/03/09/linda-ronstadt-music-simple-dreams-memoir/408779002/
Her friend CC Goldwater, whose grandfather was Arizona politician Barry Goldwater, suggested a cookbook by the superstar musician could raise funds for research into Parkinson’s disease, which Ronstadt was diagnosed with in 2012.
"I said, 'I don't cook,'" Ronstadt said, with a laugh. "She said 'Oh, it's OK.'"
A plan was hatched to gather recipes from the Goldwaters, the Ronstadts and family friend Bill Steen, who supplies the photographs in "Feels Like Home."
There are some family recipes in "Feels Like Home," but over time, it morphed into a broader celebration of the Arizona legend's roots.
It's a departure from her first memoir, "Simple Dreams," which focused more on Ronstadt's musical career. www.azcentral.com/story/entertainment/music/2018/03/09/linda-ronstadt-music-simple-dreams-memoir/408779002/
The Ronstadt family, with Linda at right on a hobby horse. The Arizona Republic spoke to Ronstadt, who lives in San Francisco, about writing the book with Lawrence Downes, how growing up in Tucson shaped who she is and the importance of family.
From Tucson to the Rock Hall:Linda Ronstadt's lifetime love affair with music www.azcentral.com/story/entertainment/music/2018/03/09/linda-ronstadt-music-simple-dreams-memoir/408779002/
The idea behind 'A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands'
How did the concept for this book take shape?
Lawrence wanted me to do a piece on "My Arizona." I said, "Let's do 'My Sonoran Desert,'" because it's a real region on both sides of the border and we get to go to Mexico. So we did and we had a really good time.
Having read both memoirs, I like that they're such different books despite covering some of the same territory.
Well, "Simple Dreams" is about my musical process. This is slightly about that, because my childhood was part of my musical process. Indeed, it was inseparable. But I just wrote about a different thing.
Could you talk about the importance of sharing this side of your story — your Mexican-American heritage and life in the borderlands?
We're really dealing with three different cultures that have the same roots. There's Mexico. There's the United States. And there's Mexican-Americans, who have been influencing people up here tremendously. Mexican food has taken over. You can get a taco anywhere. A Sonoran hot dog I don't think is so ubiquitous. But I eat them (laughs). I don't eat hot dogs and hamburgers. But a Sonoran hot dog is too good to pass up.
Different Drum: How a pop song by one of the Monkees made Linda Ronstadt a star www.azcentral.com/story/entertainment/music/2022/09/15/different-drum-linda-ronstadt-top-hit-monkees-song/10361603002/
Linda Ronstadt in the Tucson Rodeo Parade
Linda Ronstadt's musical upbringing in Tucson
You often hear of successful musicians coming from musical families, but it seems your family may have been more musical than most.
In those days, mostly everyone played the piano. It was just a thing that happened with children. They got piano lessons and they practiced. There wasn't a radio. So you had to make your own music. And people did. It might not be really good. But I think everybody should have their own music they can play and sing. It's not gonna be Paul Simon. But we have Paul Simon for that. And he does a good job.
I love the passage where you write about your family trio performing in Cele Peterson's downtown dress shop.
They had an early-bird sale. It started at 6 in the morning. Cele and my mom were friends. And she thought it would give us a little boost. Which it did. People were fighting over cashmere sweaters or girdles or whatever women buy at those sales and we were singing in the background. (Laughs.)
Did you ever make it to Phoenix to perform before you moved to California as a teen?
We auditioned at some club, I can't remember what it was called. We did well and they offered us a job but my brother was going into the police department and he didn't think they would approve of it, him hanging around in a beatnik dive.
Why 'Feels Like Home' was the perfect title for the book
Linda Ronstadt 2022
I know it's a Randy Newman song that you've recorded more than once. But what appealed to you about "Feels Like Home" as a title?
Well, it just seemed like a good way to sum up what the book was about. And I think family is important, the things your ancestors have been through.
How did growing up in in the borderlands, traveling to Mexico from Tucson, shape you?
We were driving through a landscape that was typical for me. I thought everybody had cactus in their backyard. But it turns out they didn't. I've always been proud of my heritage and where I came from. I love Tucson.
Do you miss the desert?
Oh yeah. Developers plowed up a lot of desert land and didn't put houses on it or bother to put any ground cover. So there's just dust clouds constantly. The last time I drove to Phoenix from Tucson, I was in a dust storm for two hours.
And that fence they built. That stupid fence, which doesn't keep people out because people fly in. It cuts scars in the desert and causes erosion. It empties the water table because they're using all the water to make concrete. And it prevents animals from migrating. They need to migrate to live.
An American rancher will buy 2,000 acres in Montana and build his house right in the middle so that he's completely isolated. Mexicans build their house in a village and they share the grasslands.
Linda Ronstadt playlist:25 greatest songs of all time, ranked
Ronstadt on the border wall: 'It's worthless. And it's cruel'
A young Linda Ronstadt on horseback. You grew up crossing the border to visit family on your father's side.
If you wanted to go farther south than Nogales, you had to have a permit, and the permit only lasted until such and such a date. So I would get the permit, go across and, coming back, it wasn't this incredibly long line of trucks where it takes hours to get through. You just showed your passport and you were there.
There was no point in putting up a fence. Some of those fences go right through ranchers' land. One of them goes straight through the Tohono O'odham reservation. It's preposterous. It cost a fortune. And it's worthless. And it's cruel. And they intensified the cruelty by separating families.
What do you think should be done about the situation on the border?
I think we should make it easier for them to work. They're not taking jobs away from Americans. They're doing jobs Americans won't do. They come up with a work visa, they earn money to send to their families, and then they go back. It couldn't be more ideal. More ideal would be paying them fairly, I suppose.
You write that much of the Tucson you knew in the '50s and '60s has been knocked down for blacktop and sprawl.
They destroyed a community to build (Tucson Convention Center), a so-called community center. And it was such a beautiful section. The buildings were adobe and right on the street. Now people pay big money to get a building like that, but it was for poor people. And after they tore it up, the two that were still available got rented to lawyers and money men. It's where rich people live now.
It's pretty clear in the book that despite not living in Tucson anymore, you still have a very strong connection to the area.
Well, I have tons of family and I go every year. A couple times a year sometimes. I love the Arizona Inn. I can't get enough of it.
'Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands'
"Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands" is available Tuesday, Oct. 4, where books are sold, from online retailers to independent bookstores, including Changing Hands Bookstore in Phoenix and Tempe.
Copies of the book will be available at Fox Theatre in Tucson
Reach the reporter at ed.masley@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4495. Follow him on Twitter @edmasley.
Support local journalism. Subscribe to azcentral.com today.
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 5, 2022 13:36:26 GMT
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 5, 2022 23:55:40 GMT
Feels Like Home By Linda Ronstadt
The Morning Books Show 6.54K subscribers
Buy on Amazon amzn.to/3fP9PBG
Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands […] is a way to explain why the arid land that starts in Arizona and stretches into Mexico's west coast is [Ronstadt's] foothold in the world. It's a story she has told through music, and now wants to tell—as much as she can—through food."—The New York Times
In Feels Like Home, Grammy award-winning singer Linda Ronstadt effortlessly evokes the magical panorama of the high desert, a landscape etched by sunlight and carved by wind, offering a personal tour built around meals and memories of the place where she came of age. Growing up the granddaughter of Mexican #book
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 6, 2022 0:39:05 GMT
Singer Linda Ronstadt reflects on her roots in new book www.pbs.org/newshour/show/singer-linda-ronstadt-reflects-on-her-roots-in-new-book Oct 5, 2022 6:25 PM EDT
companion post conservatism.freeforums.net/thread/10288/pbs-newshour-6-octon?page=1&scrollTo=20285
Singer Linda Ronstadt sold millions of records, performed for over four decades and made history as the first woman to have three consecutive platinum albums. Her new book, “Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands,” offers a different window into her life as she reflects on her roots. Jeffrey Brown spoke with Ronstadt for our arts and culture series, "CANVAS."
Read the Full Transcript Judy Woodruff:
And a new book out this week offers a different window into the life of singer Linda Ronstadt, who has sold millions of records. She's performed over four decades and made history as the first woman to have three consecutive platinum albums.
Jeffrey Brown spoke with Ronstadt recently for our arts and culture series, Canvas.
Jeffrey Brown:
In 1987, Linda Ronstadt, one of the biggest pop stars of her era, did something extraordinary, recording an album of traditional Mexican music.
It was called "Canciones de Mi Padre," songs of my father, and looked back to music that had moved and influenced her since childhood. It would become a surprise barrier- and record-breaking hit.
Is it true that record companies didn't want you to record the Mexican…
Linda Ronstadt, Musician:
Oh, they were horrified.
Jeffrey Brown:
They were horrified?
Linda Ronstadt:
I was oblivious. But I also knew I had the clout to do it. And it didn't occur to me that it would be successful or not successful. I just I knew I had to make the record. If I didn't make the record, I would die.
Jeffrey Brown:
At her San Francisco home today, some things are different. Beginning in the early 2000s, Ronstadt's movement slowed, her speech at times slurred by a condition first diagnosed as Parkinson's, later as progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare disorder with no known cure.
Her favorite activity now, at age 76, reading.
Linda Ronstadt:
They sing, so the subsequent generations won't forget what the current generations endured or dreamed.
Jeffrey Brown:
But with a sharp mind and a plentiful sense of humor, she is still returning to her ancestral home, physically, as in the 2019 documentary "The Sound of My Voice" and in a new book titled "Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands."
Co-written with Lawrence Downes and featuring photographs by Bill Steen, it is a celebration, complete with recipes, of place, including Tucson, where she grew up, and of people, past and present, on both sides of a beautiful, but harsh border.
Linda Ronstadt:
It's my impression of the desert as I was traveling in it with my family and the years that I have gone back and visited it.
It's a hard trip. It's a five-hour trip through real mountainous terrain. It's beautiful, but, boy, if your car gets in trouble on the road, you better hope that somebody comes by.
Jeffrey Brown:
Throughout the book, traditional song and dance, then and now.
Linda Ronstadt:
Spanish was what you sang in, and English was what you spoke.
Jeffrey Brown:
And the music of her mixed Mexican and European ancestry — a great-grandfather had come from Germany to Mexico in 1839 — and her own upbringing in a family that loved all kinds of music from traditional mariachi to opera.
Linda Ronstadt:
My mother played banjo, ukulele. She played the piano. My dad played the guitar and sang. I learned all those songs. I don't know why. I just learned them by osmosis.
Jeffrey Brown:
She was 18 in 1964, when she left home for Los Angeles, and became part of an exciting rock scene.
But, as she tells it, it didn't come easily to her.
I watched the recent documentary about your life, and there are people like David Geffen. He said that, early on, you didn't have a lot of confidence, that you didn't…
Linda Ronstadt:
I didn't have any.
Jeffrey Brown:
You didn't have any?
Linda Ronstadt:
Later on, I didn't have confidence either.
(LAUGHTER)
Linda Ronstadt:
I was very consistent in that way. But I got there to where — to a place that satisfied me.
Jeffrey Brown:
Everyone else heard something very special, a voice that stood out in songs like "You're No Good" and "Blue Bayou."
Twelve Grammys, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a National Medal of Arts, the Kennedy Center Honors, she has won them all and was a major celebrity, also known for her one-time relationship with California Governor and presidential candidate Jerry Brown.
Never known as a songwriter herself, her strength was the ability to shape a song and make it her own.
Linda Ronstadt:
I will start to sing a song and I will — a new song, and I will think, well, I will — it will be like this or like this in my imagination.
And when I actually get there and start to sing it, stuff comes up that I never would have thought of. I just — it's like watching myself saying. And I go, oh, she did that.
Jeffrey Brown:
She did that?
(LAUGHTER)
Linda Ronstadt:
Yes.
Jeffrey Brown:
Not I did that? She did that?
Linda Ronstadt:
Yes.
(LAUGHTER)
Linda Ronstadt:
Well, it was somebody working in there in my brain that doesn't consult me before, just does it. And, sometimes, it's really good, and, sometimes, it's really awful.
Jeffrey Brown:
But Ronstadt always wanted more when it came to the music she was singing. And she regularly and bravely stepped way out of her comfort zone. She recorded three albums of American songbook standards with legendary arranger and conductor Nelson Riddle.
She appeared on stage and film in the Gilbert and Sullivan classic "The Pirates of Penzance."
Linda Ronstadt:
My ambitions were for the music. I thought, there's certain music, if I could master it, then I'd be standing on firm ground. I really felt that way about Mexican music. I wanted to sing it so badly.
Jeffrey Brown:
At the time, many fans weren't even aware of her Mexican heritage. She says she wanted to change that.
Linda Ronstadt:
Well, I wanted to own it. I wanted to possess it musically, because it was such — such emotional music, and it moved me so much to listen to it.
Jeffrey Brown:
She was performing the Mexican songs in the 2000s, when she began to feel her voice and body changing.
Linda Ronstadt:
It was suddenly hard to do things that had been easy to do for me before.
Jeffrey Brown:
In her backyard garden, we talked about those changes.
You knew it was time to quit?
Linda Ronstadt:
Yes.
All my — you know, they say your life passes before your eyes before you die. My whole concert life flashed before my eyes when I was on stage doing that show. I knew it was the last one.
I don't miss performing, but I miss singing.
Jeffrey Brown:
Did it make you feel differently about yourself, about who you were?
Linda Ronstadt:
I'm still the same person. I'm just diminished.
Talking is really hard and pulling my thoughts together. I can see them, but when I go to talk, it gets jumbled. And that's Parkinsonism.
But the good part is that I have a lot of help and I have good friends. I have really good friends.
She also continues to have millions of fans.
For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Jeffrey Brown in San Francisco.
Judy Woodruff:
Not diminished at all.
Linda Ronstadt is a portrait of courage.
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