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Post by chronologer on Oct 6, 2022 2:00:39 GMT
Linda Ronstadt lost her voice but found her purpose with new book, admits ‘I never liked performing’ datebook.sfchronicle.com/music/linda-ronstadt-lost-her-voice-but-found-her-purpose-with-new-book-admits-i-never-liked-performing
Aidin Vaziri October 5, 2022 San Francisco Chronicle
Singer Linda Ronstadt at her home in San Francisco. Photo: Sam Sargent / Heyday Books repost
Linda Ronstadt lost her ability to sing nearly a decade ago, and now her vision and hearing are going too. But the Grammy-winning singer, best known for songs like “You’re No Good” and “Blue Bayou,” has not let her growing list of ailments slow her down. Over the past few years, she toured a live retrospective, produced a documentary film and picked up a Kennedy Center Honor.
Now Ronstadt, 76, has written a book.
The initial idea for “Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands,” published by Berkeley’s Heyday Books on Tuesday, Oct. 4, was to share some family recipes from her early years living between Tucson, Ariz. and the Rio Sonora region of northern Mexico. But it quickly evolved into something with a higher purpose.
Linda Ronstadt performs in 1979. (Actually 1977) Photo: Michael A Kanakis / TNS repost
Part memoir, an homage to the desert, political screed, and, yes, an instructional manual on how to make albondigas de la Familia Ronstadt, it now even comes with its own musical soundtrack, “Feels Like Home: Songs from the Sonoran Borderlands — Linda Ronstadt’s Musical Odyssey,” released by the East Bay-based Putumayo record label.
“I don’t cook, so I suppose I didn’t have anything particularly earth-shattering to contribute,” she told The Chronicle, speaking by phone from her home in San Francisco’s Sea Cliff neighborhood, about how the project evolved. “But I wanted to write about my great-grandmother and I didn’t know anything about her from my grandmother. So it just became complicated.”
Ronstadt collaborated with former New York Times journalist Lawrence Downes and photographer Bill Steen to finish the book, which also includes watercolor illustrations by Ronstadt’s father, the late Gilbert Ronstadt.
Jerry Brown, the former governor of California with whom Ronstadt was in a relationship for many years, in a statement described the book as “personal and revealing,” pointing to its photographs, family letters and family recipes.
“This is quintessentially an American story — touching, and well worth reading,” he said.
The granddaughter of a Mexican immigrant, she has drawn attention to her heritage throughout her career, most prominently with a run of albums devoted to traditional mariachi music released from 1987 to 2004, some of the best-selling non-English albums in the U.S.
“Feels Like Home” expands on the theme of her musical memoir, “Simple Dreams,” which was published in 2013. Along with the personal stories that Ronstadt has never before told in full about her ancestors and her childhood in the 1950s and ’60s, she also draws attention to the border politics that have impacted the lives of so many immigrants and refugees.
She derides the former president, who she refuses to mention by name, for “criminalizing Mexicans” and labeling them “rapists and murderers.”
“The desert was beautiful until they put tons of razor wire on it to make it look like Beirut,” Ronstadt said, “and there was no reason to do it.”
The cover of Linda Ronstadt’s “Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands.” Photo: Heyday / Heyday Books
Ronstadt said she took the Arizona desert “for granted my whole life growing up,” but her perspective changed once she moved to San Francisco.
“I love the feeling of being out on a road trip and driving through the big sky,” Ronstadt said.
Those trips have grown rarer since she announced she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2012. One of the most celebrated female vocalists of her generation, the Grammy-, Emmy-, Golden Globe- and Tony Award-winning artist has had to find new creative outlets since losing her singing voice to the degenerative brain disease.
Those include her retrospective 2018 live show, “A Conversation With Linda,” where she recollected her career interspersed with snippets of recordings and videos, and the award-winning 2020 documentary “Linda and the Mockingbirds,” about her 2019 trip to Mexico with Jackson Browne and the students of San Francisco’s Los Cenzontles Cultural Arts Academy.
That was the same year her condition was rediagnosed as progressive supranuclear palsy, an uncommon brain disorder that causes problems with walking, balance and eye movements, for which there is no known cure, according to the Mayo Clinic.
Linda Ronstadt (left) and Jackson Browne in the documentary “Linda and the Mockingbirds,” which explores her Mexican heritage. Photo: Shout Factory
Ronstadt did make a special outing recently to see Browne at Steve Earle’s all-star benefit concert for Hugh “Wavy Gravy” Romney’s Camp Winnarainbow at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco on Sept. 29, where she also spent time backstage with contemporaries such as Emmylou Harris and Elvis Costello.
“I mostly stay home because when I go out it requires wheelchairs and I have to wear clothes and all kinds of things,” Ronstadt said, her voice now a near whisper. “But it was a really great lineup — except I couldn’t hear a word that anybody sang or said, and I can’t see so I couldn’t see who was on the stage. I met Elvis Costello and didn’t recognize his face. I was really embarrassed.”
Her last concert appearance was a mariachi show in 2009 in San Antonio. Does she miss the stage?
“No, I never liked performing,” Ronstadt said. “I like to sing in the living room with friends and family. That’s my favorite thing to do. Aside from that, I love to record. But that’s over.”
Feels Like Home: Songs from the Sonoran Borderlands — Linda Ronstadt’s Musical Odyssey By Linda Ronstadt and Lawrence Downes (Heyday Books; 248 pages; $35)
Follow: Aidin Vaziri Aidin Vaziri is The San Francisco Chronicle’s pop music critic. Email: avaziri@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @musicsf
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 8, 2022 14:04:42 GMT
AUTHOR INTERVIEWS Linda Ronstadt on her new book 'Feels Like Home' www.npr.org/2022/10/08/1127631118/linda-ronstadt-on-her-new-book-feels-like-home October 8, 20228:00 AM ET Heard on Weekend Edition Saturday
SCOTT SIMON
7-Minute Listen ondemand.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/wesat/2022/10/20221008_wesat_feels_like_home.mp3?orgId=1&topicId=1033&d=468&p=7&story=1127631118&dl=1&sc=siteplayer&size=7501158&dl=1&aw_0_1st.playerid=siteplayer
NPR's Scott Simon speaks to singer Linda Ronstadt about her new book, "Feels Like Home," which looks back at her family's deep Southwestern roots.
Transcript
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Linda Ronstadt's "Feels Like Home" is an album of loves for the high desert of Sonora and her hometown of Tucson, shown through photos by Bill Stein and pages of her own recollections of family and friends and even - or maybe that's especially - recipes that bring family and friends together with echoes of each other.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "IT'S SO EASY")
LINDA RONSTADT: (Singing) It's so easy to buy love. It's so easy to fall in love. People tell me love's for fools. Here I go, breaking all the rules. It seems so easy. It's so easy. It's so easy. Yeah.
SIMON: That's just one of her 38 bestselling singles over a career that encompasses 24 albums, Grammy Awards, honors and big-time collaborators. "Feels Like Home" is written in collaboration with Lawrence Downes. And Linda Ronstadt joins us now. Thank you so much for being with us.
RONSTADT: Thank you for having me.
SIMON: I am dazzled by your description of what the sun feels like in Sonora.
RONSTADT: Feels like needles.
SIMON: Just really bores into you, doesn't it?
RONSTADT: Oh, yeah, penetrating your bones. So does the cold. People don't realize how cold it is in the desert. People get hypothermia all the time. The migrants that are walking through the desert, that's a brutal march.
SIMON: You can get all four seasons in one day, I guess.
RONSTADT: You can. (Laughter) I've gone into a movie - the sun was shining brightly - and come out, and it's - the temperature had dropped 23, 30 points. And you're freezing to death, and I - and you didn't bring a jacket 'cause it was hot when you left.
SIMON: Yeah. Tell us about your all-day family picnics.
RONSTADT: That was one of my favorite things to do. Somebody finds a good site on somebody's ranch or out in the country somewhere. And you make a mesquite fire and put a grill on it. And there's conversation that goes on and - cracks about the food. And then, somebody gets out a guitar. And you start playing a little bit. Pretty soon, they're singing a song we know, and everybody starts to harmonize. And it's not a performance. It's not like being on stage. It's just being there in the room or in the - under the trees with good food and good friends. When we were kids, we didn't have to be sent off to bed. My dad would start to sing, and we'd know we were up for another good hour.
SIMON: (Laughter).
RONSTADT: We usually fell asleep on someone's lap. But my dad had a beautiful voice.
SIMON: Yeah. You learn so much about your family here. Could I get you to talk about your family - what I'll call a mixed family - European family that married into Mexico, settled in Arizona.
RONSTADT: Well, when they first got there, they settled in Mexico. But Arizona was Mexico then, too...
SIMON: Yeah.
RONSTADT: ...And became Mexican by virtue of politics. And the border moved. So we all say we didn't move; the border moved.
SIMON: You talk about when you were growing up, people could cross the border, go back-and-forth pretty easily.
RONSTADT: We used to go down for lunch. It just was friendly. People knew each other.
SIMON: Not easy to go back-and-forth across the border these days, is it?
RONSTADT: No, it takes forever. It doesn't take as long to get into Mexico, but it takes a while. And then, coming back is - there's just a line for a mile of trucks waiting to get inspected on the way across the border. And then, there's razor wire at the border. And Nogales is the one border town that I've seen the most of. It was just a pretty, little town - you know? - like, sort of hilly. And now it's got razor wire everywhere that's trapping little animals and dangerous for children.
SIMON: Linda, if there was a message you could give to America and the world about the border, what would it be?
RONSTADT: Oh, get to know your neighbors. You might be surprised at how much you like them. It's so unfair. There are - people that come - that make that trip - it's so dangerous to get - and if you come from El Salvador, my gosh. You have to go through one, two, three countries to get here. And they are having a terrible drought. People are starving. And they're going to go someplace to survive. They want to live. They want to feed their families.
SIMON: You announced a few years ago you'd been diagnosed with progressive supranuclear palsy.
RONSTADT: Right. It's a barrel of monkeys.
SIMON: Oh. I'm sorry, but I think lots of people are wondering, what's it like for Linda Ronstadt to not be able to sing?
RONSTADT: Well, I used to love to knit.
(LAUGHTER)
RONSTADT: And I would do that when I stopped singing. And that's - I can't do that. I don't have the motor skills for it. And I'll tell you, it's really a drag not being able to when - today, I went to see Emmylou Harris. We used to sing over the phone together, you know?
SIMON: Oh.
RONSTADT: And we'd just - she harmonizes natural as anything. And I can't harmonize with her.
SIMON: Yeah.
RONSTADT: And then, when I go home to my family, I can't sing at all. And that was what held us together - you know? - 'cause some people in my family are Republicans. So I didn't hold it against them as long as we could sing together.
SIMON: Oh, my gosh.
RONSTADT: I really miss singing with other people.
SIMON: Well, people miss you singing, but we like you're talking, too. So while I have the chance, everybody listening can make this recipe in your book. I'm going to do it, like, in the next few hours - El Minuto's cheese crisps.
RONSTADT: No, no. Oh. Well, you got to have the right tortillas for that.
SIMON: Yeah, you have your tortillas. And then, after that, you just - what do you do?
RONSTADT: Well, you grate the - I use two types of cheese - longhorn cheddar and Monterey Jack cheese. And make sure you get a lot of cheese on there. And I think it's good to butter it first. Lightly butter it.
SIMON: Butter? Really? Oh, my word.
RONSTADT: Yeah, light butter, then cheese.
SIMON: And so you have some El Minuto's cheese crisps and then take a nap?
RONSTADT: If it's not that heavy.
SIMON: (Laughter).
RONSTADT: It's a thin coating of cheese, but it has to be there.
SIMON: What do you think of when you look at the sun and the mountains and the landscape of Sonora?
RONSTADT: Well, I think it's been there for a long time before I was there, and it's going to be for a long time after I'm here. So it's sort of humbling. I like to be able to see for a long distance 'cause I don't like living in a forest 'cause I can't see what's coming up on me. I love the mountains. This way I can tell where I am. If I'm going to places, like Ohio, with no mountains, I don't know how to orient myself in space.
SIMON: You could stop anyone and say, I'm Linda Ronstadt. Where am I? They'd be happy to help.
RONSTADT: Yeah (laughter). You'd be surprised.
SIMON: Linda Ronstadt, her new book with photos by Bill Stein, a collaboration from Lawrence Downes, "Feels Like Home." Thank you so much for joining us.
RONSTADT: Thank you so much for having me.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WILLIN'")
RONSTADT: (Singing) I've been warped by the rain, driven by the snow. I'm drunk and dirty, don't you know? But I'm still willing.
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 8, 2022 14:52:13 GMT
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 9, 2022 10:40:17 GMT
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 12, 2022 2:17:10 GMT
‘First Lady of Rock’ Linda Ronstadt on Sexism, Muppets, and the Mexican Border TRAILBLAZER The music legend talks about her new book “Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands,” her Mexican heritage, and the GOP obsession with the “crisis” at the border. www.thedailybeast.com/first-lady-of-rock-linda-ronstadt-on-sexism-muppets-and-the-mexican-border?ref=scroll Jeff Slate Published Oct. 11, 2022 4:50AM ET ‘First Lady of Rock’ Linda Ronstadt on Sexism, Muppets, and the Mexican Border autos.yahoo.com/first-lady-rock-linda-ronstadt-085048207.html;_ylt=Awr.1DNlZ0dj9YwAaI9XNyoA;_ylu=Y29sbwNncTEEcG9zAzYEdnRpZANMT0NVSTA1M18xBHNlYwNzcg-- Jeff Slate Tue, October 11, 2022 at 1:50 AM·11 min read
Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast; Getty
“They all know me from The Muppet Show,” Linda Ronstadt cracks when I mention the twentysomethings in my house who represent just the latest generation of fans to discover the music she made that soundtracked so much of the 1970s and ’80s.
Of course, Linda Ronstadt was a global superstar during the Golden Age of rock and roll—notably the first woman to headline arena tours, earning her the nickname “First Lady of Rock”—who went on to make a series of massive-selling Trio albums with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris, before she took a decided left turn and recorded three American Songbook albums with the big band leader Nelson Riddle, and then embraced her Mexican heritage in a very big way, recording a series of Mariachi-inspired Spanish language albums, at a time when her record label thought the move was career suicide. amzn.to/3CrZjJi www.thedailybeast.com/obsessed/kelly-clarkson-and-dolly-partons-9-to-5-duet-made-me-cry www.thedailybeast.com/emmylou-harris-sings-emmett-till-and-a-black-man-is-moved-to-tears amzn.to/3Ebsy4c amzn.to/3E8ixor amzn.to/3RyQWQm
Those albums, however, went on to sell millions and earn the icon multiple Grammys. It’s something, as Ronstadt recounts in her memoir, Simple Dreams, from 2013, that she’s enormously proud of. They also paved the way for her new book, Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands, out now. Chock-full of the Mexican ranch recipes Ronstadt learned at home, it also recalls a time before walls and politics had driven a wedge between a culture she remembers as “fluid,” when the Southwest was communal rather than rife with cultural conflict. amzn.to/3fAwdym amzn.to/3rlk9nr
The book and its recipes—it filled in a lot of the blanks of your memoir—but it’s a little more political, too. The time you’re writing about in the book, as you say, was when the border was very porous. You went back and forth. Everyone went back and forth. The culture was fluid, the food was fluid. Obviously, things have changed dramatically. Tell me a little bit about that time and the differences with today.
Well, the fence is just an insult in the landscape. It’s totally unnecessary. Most people that come in illegally come in with visas and overstay them. And also, they can dig around the fence; they can climb over it; they can cut a hole in it. It just makes it harder to do. And the workers pump the wells dry in order to make concrete. That’s bad for the water table, bad for the farmers, and horrible for animals and plants. And Trump did that. “The crisis at the border!” There is no crisis and no emergency. When I last visited there, it was quiet as can be. People were shopping, people were taking their kids to school, skateboarding and whatever. It was just perfectly normal.
Linda Ronstadt performs a song from her album Canciones De Mi Padre on the Johnny Carson Show. The album went double platinum, and at the 31st GRAMMY Awards won Best Mexican-American Performance. Steffin Butler/NBCU Photo Bank
And historically, that cross-pollination of cultures, which you write about repeatedly in the book, and the recipes, aren’t necessarily “Mexican.”
Well, I’m writing about Mexican ranch cooking. Because there’s lots of different kinds of cuisines in that region. In Mexico, you walk three blocks, you change culture. You’ve got different clothes, different food. It’s really varied, if you take the time to travel around and pay attention. There’re so many different languages spoken in Mexico, too. It’s just really diverse.
I think that’s something people in the Southwest understand, but right off the bat in the book it feels like you’re educating people about not just your history, but the history of the culture and the last 150 years, which was obviously really important to you.
Yeah. I don’t think people humanize Mexicans fully. But the cowboy outfit, that came from Mexico. The Western saddle style came from Mexico. We sing songs and eat food that comes from Mexico. And yet some people don’t want to give them fully human qualities, because I guess they think they’re not deserving. They’d rather they be invisible. On the other hand, we took their land in the Mexican War. And it was a huge chunk of land. It went all the way up to Wyoming. And maybe they haven’t forgotten that, but they still speak to us for some reason.
When you first started recording your Spanish language albums, which were huge successes, it seemed that there was a moment when the cultures, particularly in the Southwest, seemed to merge a little bit. But things have changed so dramatically. I was just in Texas a month or two ago, and 90 percent of the food—which they call Tex-Mex—is really a version of Mexican food. All the people in their MAGA hats were eating Mexican food.
Of course.
Heyday
Could you talk a little bit about the disconnect that has happened in your lifetime. Even though the food is the commonality, we’re a long way from that porous border.
Well, there are really three cultures. There’s American culture, Mexican culture, and Mexican-American culture. And they’re very distinct cultures. The Mexican-American culture influences both Mexico and United States. And Mexicans were here when [Juan Bautista] de Anza came; California, Arizona, New Mexico, and all the way up to Wyoming was bought from Mexico. And so, those people didn’t migrate. The border migrated. And they were suddenly made second-class citizens on their own land.
I loved the letters included in the book. You have your great grandmother’s letters, your aunt’s letters, and your letter to the pope. You haven’t lost your political edge, but those letters also humanize Mexicans and Mexican Americans. I can’t help but wonder if there wasn’t a little bit of political gamesmanship going on there?
Oh, I’ve always had strong politics. [Laughs] But I don’t like to put it in a confrontational way. I like to put it in an informative way. Because they’re really nice folks and they have great skills and great insights. It’s a really moral society, that’s really cooperative. I mean, you can’t steal from a neighbor, because they won’t help you fix your fence next week! You know, I was talking to my mother, and I asked, “When did all the crime start to happen?” Because, when I was growing up, there was no crime in the village. You could walk around at four in the morning and be totally safe. And she said, “When they became wageworkers rather than cooperative farmers and ranchers.” Just think about that. You know, American ranchers will build a solitary house in the middle of a huge cattle ranch, on thousands of acres. Mexicans build their house in the village, and then share the grazing land. And that sort of community makes for good moral behavior. So, they come over here and they’re shocked at how lawless we are.
American culture is obviously capitalism writ large. It was never about a cooperative thing. It was always about land ownership—and people ownership for a time—and so it seems strange that such close neighbors don’t share those morals. Especially because the western part of the United States was very much cut off from the eastern part of the United States until about 150 years ago.
Yeah, it was.
It was very much “the West” as opposed to the United States. So, in doing your research, and learning about the history of your ancestors and your family in that part of Mexico, did you learn much about the growth of American culture over the years, and was there ever a time when that more cooperative nature bled over into Arizona and New Mexico and Texas?
Well, it bleeds over in the ranches some. American ranchers will think he’s a rugged individualist who has no need for the government, even though he’s riding on federal government highways, shipping his cattle on federally financed railroads, and he’s getting subsidies for his land. But he’s unwilling to admit that. In Mexico, they have to scrape along with no regard to their government, so they help each other. In Mexico, you have to know a guy who knows a guy. That’s the only way to get things done.
That’s a theme that comes up a lot in your memoir, and also in this book. I’ve known a lot of solo artists, and it’s a different breed. But in reality, you never really were that. You always wanted to be a part of a group. You were always cooperative.
Well, I grew up singing in harmonies with my family. You know, they say blood on blood sounds good. We had shared genes and that made our voices blend better. And we had an ideal range that worked out perfectly for harmonies. So, I guess that’s what I was looking for when I went to California.
But whether it’s Dolly and Emmylou, or the Eagles or Joe Papp or Jerry Wexler, it seems to me you were always looking for good collaborators. You weren’t one of those people who was “it’s my way or the highway.” So, given what we just discussed, maybe that nature was just sort of there in your DNA.
Well, I was self-indulgent. I really wanted to do what I really wanted to do. Like, the Nelson Riddle songs I recorded, they’re self-indulgent. They’re so fun to sing, and they’re so much higher quality than the songs I was getting in the ’80s from publishing companies. So, I wasn’t cooperating with the record company, but I cooperated with Nelson.
The record company didn’t want you to do it.
No, they didn’t. But they were good about it. When they saw I was determined to do it, they got behind it and tried to support it. They didn’t just throw it away there in the world.
Honoree Linda Ronstadt attends the 42nd Annual Kennedy Center Honors at Kennedy Center Hall of States on December 8, 2019, in Washington, D.C. Paul Morigi/Getty
In your memoir, there are a lot of musicians who, although they became more thoughtful, more aware of women’s rights later in life, in the ’70s and ’80s, they were young, hard-charging guys emblematic of that era. So, did you feel like an “other” or even like a den mother to these guys? Or did they treat you like an equal?
I think all of that sexism was there, and very present in those days. But the people I was friends with were good people. Jackson Browne is a good person. Don Henley tries really hard to be a good person. [Laughs] I think it’s important to him. He has real values. But, you know, it’s hard when you become the idol of the world. It’s hard to not think you’re curing cancer. And people get real self-important. I think there’s such a thing as adult-onset narcissism. I think that’s what a lot of us are victims of. But in terms of being a woman in music, I discovered a little secret: Musicians like to play music. And they don’t want anything that stops the groove. So, if you can play the music, they don’t care who you are, as long as you keep the groove.
As I was preparing for this interview, my youngest and I pulled out Simple Dreams, and we listened to some of your stuff from around that period, and so we also watched The Muppet Show episode. What do you remember about being on The Muppet Show?
Oh, I loved doing The Muppet Show. The Muppet Show was innovative, great television. The puppeteers were so talented. They could act, too, because it was like method acting where you can only use your hands, and through very deliberate actions. They were so talented. And Jim Henson, the guy that voiced Kermit, he was just incredible to work with. He was so inspiring. And he was real cooperative! [Laughs] He let me come up with a skit and got really enthusiastic about it. He was just great. I think he was in love with Bernadette Peters, by the way. But then, I was in love with Bernadette! If I liked girls, I’d go for her, but I don’t like girls. Anyway, it was two amazing weeks of my life where I had permission to act silly. Come to think of it, we should all get to be on The Muppet Show! That would solve a lot of our problems.
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 14, 2022 11:41:39 GMT
a prelude to Feels Like Home
Linda Ronstadt’s Borderland www.mexicoecoresort.com/linda-ronstadts-borderland/ By LAWRENCE DOWNES December 27, 2014
lindaronstadt
We are driving outside Naco, Ariz., near the Mexico border, on a two-lane blacktop under a half-moon and stars. The distant mountains are lost in shadow, and there’s not much to look at beyond the headlight beams and the rolling highway stripes.
In the middle seat of the minivan, Linda Ronstadt is talking about her childhood.
“We used to sing, ‘Don’t go in the cage tonight, Mother darling, for the lions are ferocious and may bite. And when they get their angry fits, they will tear you all to bits, so don’t go in the lion’s cage tonight!’ We had really good harmonies worked out for that.”
“We” is her sister, Suzy, and her brother Peter, who used to terrify her when she had to go to the woodpile at night.
“My brother would load me up as much as he could then he’d tell me, ‘There’s a ghost!’ and then he’d run and then — Aaaaaah!! — there’d be kindling spread all over the ground.”
The ghost stories — and howling coyotes and pitch-black landscape that surrounded her family’s home — left an impression. “I am really scared of the dark.”
Actually, as we drive through the night in the Sonoran Desert, what she really seems to be is delighted. She can’t stop laughing.
When Linda thinks of home — meaning where your soul inhabits the soil, wherever else your body might be — it’s not Southern California, the place forever associated with her professional life, as Queen of Rock in the land of Byrds and Stone Poneys and Eagles. Nor is it San Francisco, where she lives now.
Her home lies in dryer, poorer country.
It’s in southern Arizona and northern Mexico, in Tucson and points south, where giant saguaros, slender and humanoid, signal touchdowns all over the hills and beside the highways. It’s where the mountains are jagged islands in a blue ocean of sky, where the rock-and-thorn terrain is hostile to people but friendly to cottonwoods, organ-pipe cactus, green-skinned palo verde trees and mesquite. It’s fertile range for cattle and horses, and well cultivated in alfalfa, peanuts and agave.
It’s the cowboy-and-Indian West. It’s a deep vein of Mexican-America, a rich stretch of bicultural borderland from Nogales to Agua Prieta. It was where Ópata, Yaqui, Pima and Apache Indians, Mexicans, Spaniards, Basques and Jesuit missionaries converged and collided in the 17th and 18th centuries.
It’s where Linda’s great-grandfather Frederick, an immigrant from Hanover, Germany, settled in the 1850s, becoming a mining engineer and a colonel in the Mexican Army. His son Federico, Linda’s grandfather, was born on a Sonoran hacienda and brought his family to Tucson in 1882. Tucson is where Linda was born, in 1946, second daughter to Gilbert and Ruth Mary Ronstadt, sister to Peter, Suzy and Mike.
You may not have thought of Linda as a Mexican-American singer, but if you’ve heard her, you’ve heard her deep Sonoran roots. Hearing the ranchera singer Lola Beltrán for the first time can bring the shock of recognition to a Linda fan; there’s influence and long tradition behind that lustrous voice. Those old Mexican songs in Linda’s hit 1987 record “Canciones de Mi Padre” were ones she learned before she was 10.
Linda, who is 67, published a memoir this fall, “Simple Dreams,” which touches only briefly on her Arizona girlhood before moving on to her recording career. I knew about Linda the rock ’n’ roll sex bomb, who just made the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and I’d gotten to know her through her work in Arizona for civil rights and immigration changes. But after reading her book, I wanted to know more about little Linda the pony wrangler and devotee of Hopalong Cassidy, and the place she grew up in the 1940s and ’50s.
I emailed her this summer and asked if she was up for a memory trip. She was — she still has a house in Tucson, and many relatives and friends to see. (Other families have family trees, she told me. “We have a family anthill. Tucson is just swarming with Ronstadts.”) And she was eager to go back down into Sonora, a journey she’d made only a handful of times. We hatched a plan: We’d meet in November, when it’s cooler, see points of Ronstadt interest in Tucson, cross into Mexico at Naco, then head down the Rio Sonora valley to grandfather Federico’s hometown, Banámichi. She wanted to bring some old friends along as guides: Bill and Athena Steen and their son Kalin, who live in Canelo; and Dennis and Debbie Moroney, who raise cattle in Cochise County, near the border. Linda and Bill would meet me in Tucson, and we’d pick up the others on the way, for a truck-and-minivan caravan down memory lane.
The dusty, friendly little Tucson where Linda used to ride to the drugstore in a pony cart is mostly gone. Linda’s father once ran the F. Ronstadt Hardware Company, selling windmills and farm machinery to ranchers. The site is now the Ronstadt Transit Center downtown bus depot.
Some points of interest on the Ronstadt trail remain. There’s the Fox Tucson Theater downtown, where her father sang, billed as Gil Ronstadt and his Star-Spangled Megaphone. Singing is simply what Ronstadts do. Her father wooed her mother with mariachi tunes. Her grandparents cherished opera; her mother loved the American songbook and taught her children those comically bloody lullabies. Peter was an accomplished boy soprano. He, Suzy and Linda used to sing in local clubs as a folk trio, the New Union Ramblers.
That early ’60s club scene is gone, and the Fox, which now screens movies and presents an eclectic mix of musicians, wasn’t quite the place to start.
Our trip began with a deeper time plunge: to Mission San Xavier del Bac, 10 miles south of downtown, on the Tohono O’odham Indian reservation. Linda calls it her “spiritual center.” (It’s also a line in Paul Simon’s song “Under African Skies”: “In early memory mission music was ringing ’round my nursery door.” Linda supplied that image, and sang harmony.)
The original mission was founded by the Jesuit Padre Kino in 1692. The existing church, begun in 1783 and never quite finished, is an astoundingly intact example of Spanish colonial architecture, alive with saints and angels. Linda performed a Christmas concert there in the ’90s, the sanctuary washed in candle-glow.
We met Linda’s friend Bob Vint, an architect who has been guiding a 25-year restoration of the mission, a project that has some years to go. He led us into the choir loft, where we marveled at the opulence below: the intricate geometries of trompe l’oeil frescoes, the wood carvings, the statue saints in hand-sewn clothing. Dogs from the reservation ambled in and out of the front door and lounged in the nave.
I rejoined Linda and Bill the next day, and we headed to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, west of downtown. Built subtly into a hillside in the 1950s, it’s a marvelous place to be dazzled by desert wildlife, minerals and plants. Linda’s father was a founding member. We strolled the walkways, saying hello to pensive prairie dogs, and pored over exhibits of gems and reptiles. Linda gave me a tutorial on cactuses and birds, though we did not ramble too far. Linda learned not long ago that she has Parkinson’s disease, which has made it harder to walk and impossible to perform. Though there is little that’s frail about her, she trembles slightly and treads deliberately, using hiking poles to keep steady.
Later, she and Bill guided me to another revelation: Sonoran hot dogs. Imagine a sausage noble enough to be given a Viking burial, wrapped in bacon, placed in a longboat-shaped bun, laden with beans, tomatoes, onions, peppers, salsa, radish slices and other treasures. We had a few at El Güero Canelo, a Tucson landmark, and staggered off to resume the Journey.
We talked about music and Mexico. Linda is dauntingly well read; her thoughts and associations spool out fast, the names pile up. The year she took her grandfather’s 1898 Martin guitar and left home for Los Angeles, soon to be opening for Odetta at the Troubador, I was more or less being born. I hid my post-boomer ignorance as best I could.
As we neared what’s left of the tiny town of Canelo, Linda noted the geological skyline. “See that hump in the mountains, that Brahma bull hump? That’s when you know you’re getting closer.”
We stayed a night in Canelo, at the Steens’ rambling complex of exquisitely plastered and tinted straw-bale buildings and work sheds (the family teaches straw-bale construction and plastering). Ducks and cats wandered around as the sun fell and a chill settled over the cottonwoods.
Linda put her poles aside and lay back on a bench to watch the stars. As Venus sank to the horizon, the rest of us drank shots of home-distilled bacanora, smooth Sonoran mezcal, from a Bud Light bottle, and talked about things I’ve forgotten.
The next morning we reloaded the minivan for a while. (Linda had a lot of bags.) I said it was like being on tour. “Except nobody’s looking to score drugs or get laid,” said Linda.
We drove on, out of the Coronado National Forest, live oaks greening the mountainsides, and through Fort Huachuca, an Army base. We got coffee in Bisbee, a town that reminds Linda of San Francisco — hilly, with hippies and tourists, though also with an open-pit copper mine.
Once we crossed the border at Naco, it was open road: the sprawling West of childhood books, grassland, mesas, cactus and agave. The countryside immediately lost the American fixation with right angles; now we were among free-form mesquite fences, lush underbrush in shades of gold and green, barriers of half-buried tires, road cuts freely shedding rocks and gravel. A highway sign said, mysteriously: “Hassle-Free Vehicle Zone.”
“It feels so much like home, more like Tucson than Tucson,” Linda said. “These mountains look so familiar to me. I just feel like they’re old faces that I know and love.”
I saw raptors gliding by, and roadrunners in the brush. We tuned to Mexican radio and heard banda music, whose shrill oompah sound owes so much to German immigrants. When we stopped for gas, guys with piles of bootleg CDs approached. We bought two by Chalino Sanchez, folk-hero of narcocorridos, old-style ballads celebrating modern-day drug culture. Chalino is known for having a terrible voice that people feel compelled to listen to anyway.
“He sings kind of like a goat,” Linda said, though she admires him, too.
Far sweeter was Trio Calaveras, a ranchera group founded in the 1930s, whom Linda knew from 78s her father brought back from Mexico. I had brought CDs. On the song “Crucifix of Stone,” a prideful man, betrayed in love, stands in misery in the moonlight beneath Christ, who cries with him. Linda listened in bliss.
“It’s that delicate combination of pleasure and anguish,” she said. “Singing on the edge of tears, holding it in, then the falsetto release — there’s incredible tension and dynamics in it. That’s pure indigenous Mexican.”
We stopped for lunch at the home of Lupita Madero, a friend of Bill’s. The simple meal was as pure Mexican as it gets: caldo de queso, fresh cheese soup, with refried beans dusted with wild chiltepin chiles, quince preserves and Sonoran flour tortillas, so thin you can see your hand through them, and coffee that Lupita roasted in her backyard, near the ristras of dried chiles and caged parakeets.
Then we were back on the mountain highway, and soon there lay below us a broad vista of the Sonora River valley, ancient thoroughfare for conquerors, missionaries, Indians and immigrants. In the cool of November, the mountains were crumpled velvet, the farmland green patches and stripes running this way and that.
The cliffs were turning pink as we raced against the setting sun. Driving in rural Mexico at night can be dangerous, Linda said: Livestock like to loiter in the dark on the warm asphalt.
The towns had Indian and Basque names — Bacoachi, Arizpe — and their welcome signs bore founding dates in the 1600s. Reaching Banámichi at dusk, we stopped at La Posada del Rio Sonora, run by a couple from Alabama, Darrin and Cheri Jones. With its boldly painted walls and tilework, potted cactuses and palms, it’s one of the loveliest inns I’ve ever seen. I relished the tropical feel, the rooftop terrace, my deep tile tub and the Wi-Fi.
We sat out on the roof and ate flan and drank bacanora. Dogs barked in the night. Linda held forth on music and politics, as the tabletop filled with peanut shells and the bacanora bottle slowly emptied.
Linda and I walked across the town plaza for 9 o’clock Mass the next day at the Church of Our Lady of Loreto, where her great-grandparents were married. The priest gave a stern homily about getting the kids to unplug the computadora. Between his rapid Spanish and the muddy speakers I missed most of it, so I concentrated on silent prayer. (Dear Lord, thank you for letting me go to Mass with Linda Ronstadt.)
Linda pointed to the statue of the Blessed Virgin above the altar. “I like that they have La Virgen at the top,” she whispered. “Girl power!” Linda went to Catholic school, but it didn’t take. “I was an atheist by third grade,” she told me, though there is a Haitian goddess she prays to, for President Obama.
That afternoon, we took in a show by a high school troupe, performing folkloric dances from Sonora and southern Mexico. A group of us gathered on the balcony of a friend’s house near the hotel, and as the scalding sunshine lowered to a golden glow, a dozen young men and women in brilliantly hued costumes swirled and twirled and stomped, gloriously. Linda noted with pride that Mexicans could take German raw materials — accordions, tubas, polka rhythms — and make them sexy. Watching the men do a difficult stumbling dance in silly old-man masks, Linda laughed as heartily as she had all trip.
The next morning, our last, we stopped by Las Delicias, a few minutes from Banámichi. Linda’s grandfather’s house was abandoned years ago. All we could see behind a barbed-wire fence was a mud-red corner of a structure, barely a shard of adobe, slowly being engulfed by nopal cactus. We gazed a while, then hit the road.
Outside Naco, Linda was in a relaxed mood. Though she hates hearing her old stuff, she surprised me by letting me play a CD of her album “Simple Dreams.” As her younger self sang Warren Zevon’s “Carmelita,” about a junkie “all strung out on heroin on the outskirts of town,” Linda asked: “Am I pretty convincing as a gun-toting heroin addict? Are you buying that?” The question cracked her up.
Later, after T-bone steaks and beers in Sonoita (Linda’s vegetarianism, like her atheism, is relaxed), the Steens drove home while Linda and I headed back to Tucson. I had more music to follow. Linda’s memoir lists a dozen performing relatives, like her brother Michael, who records with the group Ronstadt Generations. Linda’s niece Mindy, Peter’s daughter, sings in the All-Bill Band Featuring Mindy Ronstadt (with Linda’s cousin Bill on bass, and another Bill on guitar). You can see them every other Wednesday at a place in east Tucson called the Irish Pub,
That’s where I spent my last night in Tucson. I found Peter there. Over burgers and Bass ale, he told me stories about Linda as a teenager and his days as a young cop (he’s the former Tucson police chief). I listened while keeping one ear on Mindy singing Crosby, Stills and Nash, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor and old cowboy songs. Her voice was Ronstadt-pure.
When Mindy got to “Desperado,” the old Glenn Frey-Don Henley song, I got that shivery thrill Hawaiians call chicken skin. On song after song, Peter sang harmony with his daughter. He did it quietly, for nobody else’s benefit. Like Linda, whom I would hear softly singing with the radio on the road to Banámichi, he was just too musical not to. On my way out of town the next morning, I stopped by Linda’s, a 1920s house full of Mexican artwork and delicate porcelain and set about with roses and olive trees. Suzy was there, loading a garden statue, a naked cherub, into her pickup. The three of us leaned over the truck bed and talked awhile. I had asked Linda if she had any old photos for this article, but she hadn’t found any usable prints. She said she’d look over some slides and let me know.
Back in New York, I got this email: “Pete and Suzy and I are loading slides in the projector this minute.”
Then, an hour and a half later, this: “Didn’t find any useful photos, but just for a moment we fell into three-part harmony on a few lines of ‘Fair and Tender Maidens.’ ”
TASTING MENU
A trip down the Rio Sonora valley of Mexico is a plunge into the past. It’s not quite the 1600s, but in those little colonial towns — strung along the valley like rosary beads, as Linda Ronstadt says — you will find few if any restaurants, A.T.M.’s, gift shops or other tourist amenities. You can find delicious eating, though: peanuts, dried and powdered chiles, and fragrantly delicious quince paste, called cajeta, and other homegrown foods are sold by the roadside.
At La Posada del Rio Sonora in Banámichi, the cooks make the cheese soup called caldo de queso, and eggs with machaca, dried beef, served with feather-light Sonoran flour tortillas. On the table next to the salt and pepper you’ll find chiltepin chiles, which look like holly berries, with a little wooden mortar for grinding them to red-hot tasty flakes. (If you crumble them with your fingers, don’t rub your eyes ever again.) And the bar has bacanora.
If you don’t get out of Tucson, eat at Café Poca Cosa, whose Mexican-inspired menu changes daily, or the Arizona Inn, a gracious old hotel of pink adobe and privet hedges. The huevos rancheros, with chorizo, are not an ancient recipe, but yummy.
Lawrence Downes is an editorial writer for The Times. www.nytimes.com/2013/12/29/travel/linda-ronstadts-borderland.html
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 14, 2022 20:17:11 GMT
Linda Ronstadt: ‘I didn’t believe in religion from the time I was six – I thought, that’s bullshit’As she releases her memoir, Feels Like Home, the singer whose voice defined the 70s talks about the illness that ended her career, America’s attitude to immigrants, and Dolly Parton’s fried green tomatoesLinda Ronstadt: ‘I just didn’t see why I should get married. It would have meant giving up a lot’Linda Ronstadt is waiting on a visit from Emmylou Harris. “It’s lovely to see Emmy,” she says of her former singing partner. “She always brings her laundry here when she’s on the road.” inews.co.uk/culture/music/linda-ronstadt-interview-memoir-feels-like-home-music-mexico-1910305
Interviews are no easy matter for the 76-year-old, who delivered her final stage performance in 2009, almost a decade after her voice started to fail her. In 2012, she was diagnosed as having Parkinson’s disease. A re-evaluation in late 2019 changed her diagnosis to the similar but rare brain disorder progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), though she still refers to it as Parkinson’s. inews.co.uk/topic/parkinsons-disease?ico=in-line_link
She has mobility problems, speaks with a strained voice and is “very hard of hearing”, she tells me over the phone from her San Francisco home.
Last night, she saw Harris in concert, performing alongside Steve Earle, Elvis Costello and Jackson Browne. “I could tell they were good songs, but I could not understand a word they sang – not one word.” inews.co.uk/culture/music/elvis-costello-interview-this-years-model-spanish-model-luis-fonsi-dream-1190627?ico=in-line_link
Ronstadt is a genuine superstar, the only woman to earn five platinum albums in a row. She has 11 Grammys and her covers of “You’re No Good”, “Blue Bayou” and “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore” helped to define the sound of the 70s. PSP robbed us of one of the great voices of modern music – a singer Randy Newman dubbed “Mighty Mouse” because of the power of her vocals. Her final recording, a duet with Jimmy Webb, was in 2010.
BERKELEY, CA - SEPTEMBER 1977: Linda Ronstadt performs at the Greek Theater on September 17, 1977 in Berkeley, California. (Photo by Ed Perlstein/Redferns/Getty Images)
It must be painful not being able to sing any more, I suggest. “I can still sing in my mind,” she replies cheerily.
The comment sums up the witty, smart and wonderfully forthright character that shines through her absorbing memoir Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands.
Ronstadt, born on 15 July 1946 in Tucson, Arizona, grew up “saturated in song”. Her father, Gilbert, led a band called The Star-Spangled Megaphone. “Dad liked it when I sang Mexican music,” she says. “I don’t know what he thought about the rock-and-roll stuff.”
Some of their ancestors emigrated from Hanover, Germany, in the 1840s and took root in the Rio Sonora region of Mexico. The book includes a heart-wrenching letter by her great-grandmother Margarita, in 1886, revealing her grief over her three-year-old son Armando, who died an agonisingly slow death after pulling a pot of scalding milk on to himself from a kitchen table.
Her grandfather Fred later moved to Tucson, Arizona, which is why her life is something of a both-sides-of-the-border story.
“We spent a lot of time with family in Mexico, visiting Guaymas, a fishing town on the Sea of Cortés, every summer. It was much cooler there. My dad, mum, sister Suzy and brothers Peter and Mike all sang harmonies in the car. It was before we had air conditioning, so you needed something to distract you from the heat,” she recalls.
BERKELEY, UNITED STATES - SEPTEMBER 26: Linda Ronstadt performing at the Greek Theater in Berkeley, California on September 26,1982. (Photo by Clayton Call/Redferns)
Her childhood seems one from an impossibly lost world. The book’s cover photograph shows a young, wistful-looking Ronstadt, sporting a cool Hopalong Cassidy cowboy hat, watching a rodeo.
“I was riding from the age of three,” she explains. “There was a stable down the road and I learned on a very gentle horse. I loved riding down to the river or to the drug store, where we could buy a Coke. If I was to get on a horse now, I would just have to ride straight to the hospital.”
Ronstadt laments the demise of the community spirit she grew up around. “Mexican ranchers lived in a village and shared grazing land. Everybody helped each other. It keeps a very high level of morality, because if you steal from your neighbour, he’s not going to help with your fence next week. If your car breaks down, someone will come along and help. If you break down on the side of the freeway in Los Angeles, they’ll just run over you to put you out of your misery.”
Ronstadt’s adopted children, Mary and Carlos, were raised very differently to her. “I grew up with a lot of freedom,” she says. “But I was a helicopter mother. I hovered over them. My parents were more laissez-faire.”
Even as a young child, she joined her family in hunting for their food. “I don’t have a problem with hunting,” she says, “I have a problem with corporations breeding animals factory-style. The ranch’s way of living is shooting your meat so it’s fresh, before it spoils with no refrigeration. Our family picnics were like something from the 1800s. You learned to shoot rabbit or quail.” What was she like with a rifle? “We didn’t use it for anything aggressive and I didn’t spend a lot of time practising, but before my illness, before I started shaking, I was a good shot,” she says with a laugh.
Ronstadt’s new memoir, Feels Like Home
In her time, then, she has eaten a lot of unusual things, including rattlesnake (“Urgh, that has a nasty, fishy film”) and white-winged dove (“tender, juicy breast meat and tiny drumsticks and wishbone”), and her tasty recipes – using beans, tamales, chiles and melted cheese – are a charming element of the memoir. Given that visit from Emmylou – and the fact that in Ronstadt’s career, she worked with some of the 20th century’s most influential artists, and many became firm friends – I wonder what she feeds them.
“I didn’t cook for Dolly Parton,” she says. “In fact, she cooked for me. She makes fried green tomatoes in bacon grease. It’s delicious. Emmylou makes a lovely pound cake. I only make a good butter and honey sandwich.”
When Ronstadt was 12, she was serenaded by a 17-year-old Mexican man called Mario, using a whole mariachi band, as a prelude to a marriage proposal. “Yeah, they start early in Mexico,” she says. “I think he was just putting down a marker.
“In Mexico, even in the 50s, it was a lot like the 19th century. Women didn’t go anywhere unchaperoned. Girls got married young there – at 13 – so when you are 12, men are already looking you over. It wasn’t so hard for me, because I didn’t have to live there all year round.”
I wonder if that experience as a child put her off marriage altogether – Ronstadt reportedly had high-profile romances with film-maker George Lucas, politician Jerry Brown, musicians Mick Jagger and J D Souther and comedians Jim Carrey and Bill Murray.
“I think for me, I just didn’t see why I should do it,” she says. “It would have meant giving up a lot.”
I ask Ronstadt whether she enjoyed her time in showbusiness, looking back. She did. “But I found it very awkward and dumbfounding. Fame made very little difference with my family or very old friends and I didn’t socialise in the world of celebrity,” she says. “It was a different time. People track your life now on the internet. They couldn’t do that when I was touring.”
In Ronstadt’s book, she writes that America should now be called “The United States of Who the F**k Are You?”. She is passionate about the plight of immigrants and in 2019, she told then-US secretary of state Mike Pompeo to “stop enabling an immigrant-hating president”. She refers to Donald Trump only as “the 45th president”.
“I didn’t mention Trump by name, because I didn’t want it in the book, making it dirty,” she says. “It was a horrible experience having someone that crude and vulgar be president. He is basically without any human qualities.”
Did she experience prejudice growing up? “No, I was exempt because I have white skin and a German surname,” she replies, deadpan. “We need better immigration legislation. Nobody leaves their home on a whim: they are running for their lives.”
Although she was brought up “Mexican-Catholic”, Ronstadt finds no solace in religion herself. “I didn’t believe it from the time I was six; I thought, ‘That’s bullshit.’”
Has her philosophy of life changed over time? “I’m not sure there is a lot to be optimistic about today,” she replies. “I hope for the best, but I don’t expect it. I always think you should treat people fairly. If I had a religion, it would be compassion.”
Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands by Linda Ronstadt and Lawrence Downs, is published by Heyday Books, at £24.99
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 14, 2022 20:36:07 GMT
USA TODAY Linda Ronstadt addresses 'worthless' border wall, why her new memoir is called 'Feels Like Home' currently.att.yahoo.com/att/linda-ronstadt-addresses-worthless-border-201813921.html Ed Masley, Arizona Republic Sun, October 9, 2022 at 1:18 PM·6 min read
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/ www.azcentral.com/story/entertainment/music/2022/10/04/linda-ronstadt-2022-book/8141191001/
Her friend CC Goldwater, whose grandfather was politician Barry Goldwater, suggested the singer do a cookbook to raise money for research into Parkinson’s disease, which Ronstadt was diagnosed with in 2012.
"I said, 'I don't cook,' " says Ronstadt, 76, 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."
The book includes some family recipes, but over time, it morphed into a broader celebration of Ronstadt's Arizona roots.
It's a departure from her first memoir, "Simple Dreams," which focused more on Ronstadt's musical career. www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2013/09/16/simple-dreams-linda-ronstadt-review/2735213/
Ranked: The 25 best Linda Ronstadt songs of all time www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/music/2022/07/19/linda-ronstadt-best-songs-ranked/10093199002/
The Ronstadt family, with Linda at right on a hobby horse.
Ronstadt, who lives in San Francisco, spoke about the book (co-written with Lawrence Downes), how growing up in Tucson shaped who she is and the importance of family.
Q: Having read both memoirs, I like that they're such different books, despite covering some of the same territory.
Answer: 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. ... Mexican food has taken over. You can get a taco anywhere. A Sonoran (Desert) 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.
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 going to be Paul Simon. But we have Paul Simon for that. And he does a good job.
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.
Linda Ronstadt in 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?
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.
A young Linda Ronstadt on horseback. 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.
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.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Linda Ronstadt talks 'Feels Like Home' book, 'worthless' border wall www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/music/2022/10/09/linda-ronstadt-new-memoir-feels-like-home/8230124001/
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 16, 2022 10:06:56 GMT
Home / ‘It’s About Being Loved’: Linda Ronstadt Celebrates Her Mexican-American Heritage with New Book rockcellarmagazine.com/linda-ronstadt-interview-feels-like-home-book-mexican-american-heritage/ rockcellarmagazine.com/linda-ronstadt-memoir-feels-like-home-details-2022/
‘It’s About Being Loved’: Linda Ronstadt Celebrates Her Mexican-American Heritage with New Book JEFF SLATE ON OCTOBER 12, 2022 CATEGORIES:FEATURED ARTICLESFEATURES Rock Cellar MagazineLinda Ronstadt 'Feels Like Home' (Photo: Sam Sargent)
Linda Ronstadt, the queen of California cool, recalls her heyday and the formative years that inspired her new book Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands — published in early October, amid Hispanic Heritage Month.
When I apologize Linda Ronstadt for having to reschedule our interview after what turned out to be a relatively mild strain of COVID blew through our household, she tells me not to worry.
“We had it here too!” she says, in a warm voice that immediately puts me at ease. “I didn’t get it bad, but everyone else did.”
Ronstadt was a global superstar in the 1970s and ’80s of a magnitude not really imaginable in today’s ultra-niche marketed world. In those pre-internet days, at the zenith of her superstardom, Ronstadt was a pop culture darling the likes of which don’t really exist anymore. rockcellarmagazine.com/?s=linda+ronstadt
Today, the recipient of 11 Grammy Awards as well as the 2016 recipient of the Recording Academy’s Lifetime Achievement Award, Ronstadt is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and, in 2014, she was honored by President Barack Obama, who awarded her the National Medal of Arts at a White House ceremony. www.rockhall.com/inductees/linda-ronstadt
Five years later, she was celebrated with a Kennedy Center Honor.
But, as the 76-year-old icon recalls, she has some regrets.
During the first decade of her career, despite releasing hit singles “You’re No Good,” “Blue Bayou” and “Heat Wave,” which began her path to selling 100 million-plus records, Ronstadt insists she did just about everything wrong.
“I didn’t really understand how to sing — how to use my voice — until much later, about 1980,” she tells Rock Cellar. “And I was always so nervous!”
Her singing voice, of course, has been silenced. A decade ago, Ronstadt was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease (her last public performance was in 2009). But in 2019, that diagnosis was changed to progressive supranuclear palsy, a degenerative, Parkinson’s-like disease that has made it hard for Ronstadt to walk, grip everyday things around her house and even brush her teeth. Most significantly for the rest of us, perhaps, it’s made it impossible for her to channel that magnificent voice that once enraptured millions.
“Actually, I miss harmonizing,” Ronstadt says with a chuckle when asked if she misses performing. “That’s how I started out — singing with my family — and the albums I made with Emmylou [Harris] and Dolly [Parton] were just an extension of that. Those are some of my happiest memories.”
After years living in the Los Angeles area — in fact, she was L.A. royalty, collaborating with friends Jackson Browne and Don Henley, and dating then-California Governor Jerry Brown — Ronstadt now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
“I got tired of L.A.,” she admits. “It’s quiet here. And I love my home, which is good because I spend most of my time here now!”
Click here to pick up Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands book from our Rock Cellar Store ON SALE (Currently sold out and temporarily out-of-stock; When we get more, the sale price will continue.) bit.ly/3CmuOmO
Click here to pick up Feels Like Home: Songs from the Sonoran Borderlands on CD from our Rock Cellar Store — ON SALE bit.ly/3EB9IDP
The occasion for our conversation, however, is Ronstadt’s new book, Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands. (A companion album of Ronstadt’s songs and collaborations with her famous friends is also available.)
Originally envisioned as a cookbook of sorts – “except I don’t cook” – the book, a follow-up to her 2013 best-selling memoir, eventually became a mission of sorts for Ronstadt.
“I passed for white, growing up in Tucson, when it was very segregated,” she explains. “My name; the way I look. So, this was a way for me to more deeply explore my Mexican heritage, and to help humanize a culture that is part of me and that I truly love.”
A folk fan as a kid, Ronstadt’s early views were shaped by the musicians she admired, like Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary. As a celebrity in her own right, Ronstadt has used her platform over the years to speak out against issues like everything from nuclear power plants to, these days, the truth about Mexicans and Mexican-Americans.
“The book is built around Mexican ranch cooking recipes,” Ronstadt explains. “But most Americans don’t really understand Mexico. It’s really diverse. And being Mexican or Mexican-American, it’s a kind of like being invisible. And also, there’s a [sense of] community that makes for good moral behavior. It’s the backbone of everything in Mexico. So, the book’s about that, too.”
It’s also about much more than that, though.
“It’s about being loved,” Ronstadt admits. “And it’s about having a sense of place, and knowing who you are, I think.”
As a child in Tucson, Ronstadt recounts in Feels Like Home, she would hear her mother sing Gilbert and Sullivan show tunes as she accompanied herself on the piano, her father play the music of his Mexican ancestors, her sister spinning the music of Hank Williams and her grandmother listening for hours to the opera she loved so dearly, and that Ronstadt says she now prefers over the Hit Parade.
But the Arizona community Ronstadt was raised in was so close to the U.S.-Mexico border, she says, moving between the two countries was “like nothing at all.”
She describes the border then, and the cross-cultural pollination, as “fluid,” something she hopes she’s captured in Feels Like Home.
“Everything was built around community,” she recalls. “But my favorite thing was our all-day family picnics. We would cook and sing. It was very relaxed. It wasn’t like performing. But I guess that’s where I got my love of it.”
It led to long nights harmonizing with her siblings.
“We’ve got the shared genes, and I think that made the voices blend better,” she says. “Plus, we had an ideal range of vocal ranges in our band. I was a soprano, my sister was an alto, my little brother could be tenor or bass — he had a wide range — and my other brother’s a baritone. That worked out perfectly for harmonies. But the level of music when I was at home wasn’t particularly a professional level. It was just what you did to enjoy music. When I went to California, it wasn’t the same as it had been when I was at home.”
In California, of course, Ronstadt was quickly on the path to stardom. In the ’70s, she had hit after hit. But by the ’80s, things had changed. After a performance of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta in New York City’s Central Park, and three wildly successful albums with Harris and Parton, Ronstadt was looking for yet a bigger challenge.
“The eighties wasn’t known for its great songwriting,” she recalls. “Except for Tom Petty, he’s a great songwriter and a great singer. I love Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. So, that was when I started thinking about the old standards I knew when I was young, because that was a time that was known for melodies you could croon on your way out of the theater. And [Nelson Riddle and his] orchestra are so rich, the songs are so singable, anybody can sing them. You can really fly with those. You can do all kinds of things. The emotions are layered, and so I just had to sing them.”
Not long after the huge success of those American Songbook albums — long before Rod Stewart and a host of other rockers took them on — Ronstadt went back to the music she grew up with.
She released a string of albums of Mexican mariachi and Spanish music, earning a clutch of Grammys in the process. And Canciones de Mi Padre, her 1987 collection of traditional Mexican songs, went on to become the biggest-selling foreign language album in U.S. history. rockcellarstore.com/UPC/081227945411
So, seemingly, it all led back pretty naturally to Feels Like Home, the way Ronstadt sees it.
How did she go about choosing the recipes?
“They’re what I eat at home,” she freely admits of the recipes she learned as a child from her family. “Beans, tortillas, cheese, squash, fresh chilis, dried chilis, and whatever meat there is. As a kid, we had a garden, and we grew our own corn and our own squash, our own watermelons. We had a salad bowl we planted. So, I grew up eating fresh food. And the beef we ate was all grass-fed. We got it before it went to the slaughterhouse. I grew up on clean meat, and it tastes completely different.”
When I say that I think many Americans, and certainly those who think of themselves as health-conscious, think of Mexican food as heavy and fattening, Ronstadt is quick to point out that the recipes in Feels Like Home are very healthful.
“If you eat whole foods, you do better,” she says, flatly. “And my recipes are based on whole foods. It’s true a lot of Mexican food has highly refined ingredients and isn’t healthy. It’s all starches and fat, and it’s nasty fat, like canola oil. So I use olive oil a lot. I use lard when I can get it, and that actually has less cholesterol than butter. The problem is, the store-bought lard now, it isn’t good, because it’s taken from those poor pigs who live in sheds and live in misery all their lives. It tastes like pig gristle.”
The subject raises Ronstadt’s ire, who shows the fiery political side she was known so keenly for in the 70s and 80s.
“You know, we’re heading for a war!” Ronstadt exclaims, before explaining her seeming detour. “What I mean is, we’re heading for water wars. And maybe the Central Valley will be against the West Coast, the coastline, because the farmers here in California take 80 percent of the water, and they’re growing things like almonds and cotton, really thirsty crops. California is a desert. So, they’re going to kill the fertility of the Silicon Valley sooner or later. And we’ll also be fighting over the water because they need to plant drought-powered crops.”
And a lot of those farmers are corporatized farmers, I point out.
“Yeah, they are,” Ronstadt says with a sigh. “They’re not family farmers. They plant on such a massive scale, they’re trying to industrialize agriculture, and agriculture doesn’t like to be industrialized. It should really be the agriculture non-industry!”Linda Ronstadt: ‘Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands’ Memoir Coming in October rockcellarmagazine.com/linda-ronstadt-memoir-feels-like-home-details-2022/ JEFF CAZANOV ON APRIL 4, 2022 CATEGORIES:LATEST NEWS Rock Cellar Magazine Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands is the title of a new book from legendary singer/songwriter/musician Linda Ronstadt, co-authored by former New York Times reporter Lawrence Downes, which will be published on Oct. 4 by Heyday Books.
Limited quantity (and on sale now) in our Rock Cellar Store HERE
In the works for some time, Ronstadt’s social media pages officially announced the memoir on Monday, along with a description of its focus and relevance to her life and career:
Linda is delighted to share the news that she has a new book, all about her childhood, family and roots in Mexico and Arizona. FEELS LIKE HOME: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands, which is close to her heart.
It celebrates the history, traditions, music and foods of a starkly beautiful land, the place that made Linda who she is. Linda wrote it with her friend Lawrence Downes, formerly with The New York Times, and they filled it with Ronstadt family stories, beautiful photos, and traditional songs and recipes, so you can see, hear and even taste what makes this corner of the world so precious to her.
www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=531086495039995&set=a.275589443923036&type=3
For even more details about the book, here’s an expanded description via this link, where you can pre-order a copy now:
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.
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 22, 2022 12:05:11 GMT
Woman's World
Linda Ronstadt's New Book 'Feels Like Home' Offers a Fascinating Look at Her Life (Plus Delicious Recipes) www.msn.com/en-us/foodanddrink/foodnews/linda-ronstadt-s-new-book-feels-like-home-offers-a-fascinating-look-at-her-life-plus-delicious-recipes/ar-AA13c8rd Abbey Bender - Thursday
With her powerful voice and bohemian cool, singer Linda Ronstadt has been inspiring women for decades. Though she retired from music due to health issues, she’s still working. Her latest project is a new book, Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands (Buy from Amazon, $29.49), that she co-wrote with Lawrence Downes. In it, Ronstadt discusses her background and artistic inspirations through a combination of memoir, travelogue, cookbook, and scrapbook, complete with old family photographs.
In 2013, Ronstadt wrote a more traditional memoir about her career titled Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir (Buy from Amazon, $18.99), and in 2019, she was the subject of a biographical documentary titled Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice (available to stream on HBO Max). Her new book, however, goes much farther back, diving into her personal history, tracing her family’s Mexican roots in Sonora, and fondly recalling how her musical childhood in Arizona shaped her as a performer.
Embracing Her Roots
In the book, Ronstadt says that while she didn’t grow up in Sonora, Mexico like her older relatives, she feels a deep connection to the land and its traditions: “My sense of connection to my ancestors is strengthened by my own vivid sensory memories of Sonora and things they also knew and loved, particularly those involving music and food.” Throughout the book, Ronstadt brings these memories to life with family photos and letters from loved ones, simultaneously telling her story and imparting the value of ours.
Ronstadt’s stories of her childhood on the cultural border are evocative and nostalgic. She recalls living off the land, shooting doves for food (“I could shoot a rifle when I was six… I wouldn’t want to ever do that to any dove again”); riding horses from the time she could walk (“the world I’m from has been horse country for 500 years”); and of course, singing with her family (“not all Ronstadts made a living at it, but music was the homegrown magic we all learned to conjure”).
Fittingly, the book has an accompanying Spotify playlist, Feels Like Home: Songs From the Sonoran Borderlands — Linda Ronstadt’s Musical Odyssey. It also features a collection of Ronstadt’s notes on the the music that shaped her, including “Songs We Ronstadts Loved and Sang” and “Songs of Mexico and the Borderlands.” Reading Feels Like Home, you see just how far back her passion for music goes.
Young Linda Ronstadt on horseback © Provided by Woman's World
The Power of Traditional Recipes
Feels Like Home isn’t a cookbook in the traditional sense, but it includes 20 recipes. “As for the Ronstadt recipes, these are the real ones that I grew up with and that have reappeared at holidays and other family gatherings for generations,” Ronstadt writes. It’s something everyone can relate to — family culinary staples passed down through generations. While some of the ingredients in Ronstadt’s recipes may be hard to find at your local grocery store, they can easily be found online (she recommends the site nativeseeds.org for traditional Sonoran ingredients). The book includes recipes for hearty dishes like beef stew, cheese soup, and enchiladas, of which Ronstadt’s descriptions are both entertaining and appetizing. “If pizza dough could dream, this is what it would wish to become: thin enough to see through, strong enough to wrap a burrito,” she writes of the traditional Sonoran tortilla. For the singer, both music — “the unbreakable chain of melody,” as she calls it — and food continue to be her faithful companions.
A Simple Recipe: Ronstadt Family Meatballs
Eager to immerse myself in Ronstadt’s world, I decided to try making her family’s meatball recipe. Spicy or sweet, saucy or soupy, meatballs are a comfort food in almost every culture. Ronstadt’s family recipe is unique in that it contains no binding agents like breadcrumbs or eggs; it’s just meat, tomatoes, herbs and spices, and some olive oil (or lard, if you want to keep it authentic). The meatballs are cooked quickly in a pot of boiling water and served in their liquid, which becomes a mellow broth that pops with a drizzle of lime. Here’s the recipe:
Ingredients (Makes about 65 meatballs, or 6 to 8 servings):
6 medium-sized tomatoes, preferably plum3 pounds ground beef, preferably flank and round steak½ cup fresh mint, finely chopped½ cup cilantro, minced1 small garlic clove, minced1 medium scallion, minced2 tablespoons oreganoSalt and pepper to taste¾ cup olive oil or melted lard6 cups boiling waterLime wedges for serving Instructions:
Set oven to broil. Place tomatoes on rimmed baking sheet and broil until skin can be removed easily, approximately 10 minutes. Peel tomatoes and remove seeds. Purée in blender to yield 1 ½ cups. Set aside.Place ground beef in large bowl. Add mint, cilantro, garlic, scallion, oregano, salt, and pepper. Mix well. Add tomato purée to meat mixture. Knead until well combined. Add oil or melted lard to mixture, and knead until fully incorporated. (Mixture should be neither dry nor too wet.) Shape small portion of mixture into walnut-sized ball. (It should hold together.) Continue forming walnut-sized balls, dropping into boiling water in sets of 5 to 10. Cook 5 to 8 minutes per set. Serve meatballs in liquid they were cooked in, with lime wedges on the side.
Bowl of meatballs © Provided by Woman's World The Ronstadt family meatballs, as they appear in the book.Reproduced with permission from Heyday Books
My Taste Test
I have to admit, I was skeptical — I assumed the meatballs I made would either fall apart instantly, or result in a dreary brown bowl of wannabe meatball soup (or both!). However, my meatballs came out perfectly, and their brothy goodness was both comforting and nostalgic. Digging in, I imagined Ronstadt’s family doing the same many decades ago, and I felt a profound sense of connection.
The dish isn’t fancy, but it highlights several of Sonora’s unique flavors. To maximize the experience, listen to Canciones de Mi Padre (“Songs of My Father”), Ronstadt’s 1987 Spanish-language album (which remains the biggest-selling foreign-language album in American music history) while you cook.
Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands is available now from Heyday Books.
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 25, 2022 9:36:30 GMT
Growing up with Linda Ronstadt
www.cleburnetimesreview.com/living/growing-up-with-linda-ronstadt/article_a4ee247c-5172-11ed-97b3-9fefb89ec271.html BY Matt Smith msmith@trcle.com Oct 23, 2022
Progressive supranuclear palsy, a degenerative disease affecting brain activity, silenced singer Linda Ronstadt’s soaring, beautiful voice more than a decade ago. A voice that fueled record sales in the millions spanning an array of musical genres from rock, pop, jazz, country, big band and more.
Ronstadt’s 1987 album, “Canciones de Mi Padre,”a collection of traditional Mexican mariachi songs in tribute to her father and grandparents, remains the biggest non-English language selling album in America. A voice that arguably landed Ronstadt among the best female singers, not to mention song interpreters, ever, stirred the passions of countless teenage boys throughout the ’70s and ’80s and, more importantly, inspired no telling how many women to pursue careers in music.
Though she’s tragically no longer able to perform or record, Ronstadt still has much to say. To that end, she, pre-COVID-19 at least, made several public appearances for talks and Q&A sessions and took to writing her thoughts in book form.
“Feels Like Home” isn’t the world famous Ronstadt of chart-topping hits, sold out arenas, Cub Scout uniforms, collaborations with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris or sharing the stage with the Rolling Stones to sing “Tumbling Dice.”
Some of that gets mentioned here, mostly in passing, but for the fuller version of those tales check out Ronstadt’s first book, “Simple Dreams,” from 2013.
“Feels Like Home” is more the before though also some of the during and after of Ronstadt’s superstardom reign and as such feels the more intimate and personable of the two.
Credit that to the book’s conversational style though which Ronstadt, now 76, comes across as down-to-earth, regular, albeit extremely talented, folk. She comes across bright, well spoken and engaging — for further evidence of that, head to YouTube and watch her old interview show appearances from the ’70s and ’80s — if at times opinionated and a bit cranky though never really in a bad way.
Informative yet casual, reading the book feels like a day hanging out with Ronstadt while being amazed by her ordinary demeanor lack of pretense despite her wealth and fame.
At one point, Ronstadt writes of her sister showing up and helping her unload the bed of her old pickup. Hard to imagine any of the talent-lite, reality music show divas littering today’s Top-40 charts engaging in such. Much of the book if fact is the fruit of multiple home visits, road trips and other conversations with co-author Lawrence Downes.
What started as a proposed book of family recipes — which are still here — morphed into a proud, bittersweet Ronstadt love letter to her family and home. The Sonoran, a borderless region, encompasses Ronstadt’s hometown Tucson, Arizona and much of Mexico incorporating numerous cultures and languages all of which played into Ronstadt’s Mexican/Germanic ancestry and upbringing.
As did music of all styles. Ronstadt talks of family and community singalongs.
“The music never felt like performance,” Ronstadt writes. “It simply ebbed and flowed with the rest of the conversation.”
Ronstadt writes lovingly and proudly of her parents and grandparents love of music, the letters of her great grandmother, Margarita Redondo Ronstadt, now preserved in the Arizona History Museum, and her aunt, Luisa Espinel Ronstadt, who traveled the world performing opera and Spanish folk songs through the 1920s.
Elsewhere Ronstadt writes of the Martin guitar she played early on in her career, which her grandfather bought brand new in the late 1800s and later passed on to Ronstadt’s father who later passed it on to her. Ronstadt has since passed it on to her nephew.
She writes of the courtship of her grandparents and F. Ronstadt, a carriage and agricultural implements, and later hardware store, founded by her grandfather and later taken over by her father.
On a more humorous, and actually, pretty cool, note, Ronstadt shares the tale of her father who, while a student at the University of Arizona, rode a horse up the stairs of the Delta Gamma sorority house in order to woo a coed.
Ronstadt holds scant love for the concrete and corporate progress that have altered much of her hometown while at the same time separating and marginalizing many a historic neighborhood.
Sadness too she expresses over acceptance of her own mortality and the loss of family members now gone, most poignantly her brother Mike and sister Suzy.
“I miss her, and I miss Mike, who was taken far too soon,” Ronstadt writes dolefully. “[My other brother] Peter and I are plugging away.”
Sorrow sure, but also joy over a life well lived and family, friends, culture and music treasured.
The only drawback being that, for all the pictures of family, friends and places, I would liked to have seen more of Ronstadt herself.
But that’s a small c complaint and “Feels Like Home” is an otherwise wonderful read.
“Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands”
By Linda Ronstadt
and Lawrence Downes
Heyday Publishers
238 pages
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 26, 2022 10:22:26 GMT
Linda Ronstadt Sets Fall Release Date for New Memoir Focused on Her Homeland www.nodepression.com/linda-ronstadt-sets-fall-release-date-for-new-memoir-focused-on-her-homeland/ Stacy ChandlerPOSTED ON APRIL 5, 20
So much of Linda Ronstadt’s music is rooted in the sounds and spirit of her childhood, and the singer’s new book, Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands, aims to share that part of her life story.
Ronstadt announced on her social media accounts Monday that Feels Like Home, co-written with former New York Times writer Lawrence Downes, will be published on Oct. 4 by Heyday Books.
Feels Like Home “celebrates the history, traditions, music and foods of a starkly beautiful land, the place that made Linda who she is,” the announcement says. The book features family stories, photos, and traditional songs and recipes “so you can see, hear and even taste what makes this corner of the world so precious to Linda.”
http://instagr.am/p/Cb78-LXMMmD Ronstadt grew up in a Mexican American family, spending time in Tucson, Arizona, and the Rio Sonora region of Northern Mexico.
“There’s a Mexican story that isn’t often told about the desert and the families who live there,” Ronstadt says in a longer announcement on Heyday Books’ website. “It takes cooperation and ingenuity to survive and build a beautiful life in such a harsh environment. This is Arizona, where I was born, and Sonora, where my soul is anchored.” www.heydaybooks.com/linda-ronstadt-to-publish-new-book-with-heyday/
Ronstadt’s previous book, Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir, was published in 2013 and focused primarily on her music career.
Ronstadt, now 75, stopped performing in 2009 and was later diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease — but more recently the diagnosis has been changed to a rare brain disorder called progressive supranuclear palsy, or PSP, she told CNN. www.cnn.com/2019/12/28/entertainment/linda-ronstadt-anderson-cooper-intv/index.html
THE READING ROOM: Linda Ronstadt Shares Life Story in a Desert Landscape www.nodepression.com/the-reading-room-linda-ronstadt-shares-life-story-in-a-desert-landscape/ Henry CarriganPOSTED ON OCTOBER 20, 2022
In her 2013 autobiography Simple Dreams, Linda Ronstadt shares her life as a key part of the Southern California country rock scene of the late ’60s and early 1970s. Her voice soars in those pages much as it does on albums such as Don’t Cry Now, Hasten Down the Wind, Canciones de Mi Padre, and Feels Like Home. Simple Dreams carries readers back to a place and time in which artists floated in and out of one another’s studios and lent their voices and playing to one another’s albums. Her book remains one of the best music memoirs out there because of its focus on the music itself and reflections on the process of making it.
Now Ronstadt goes beyond her life in music to share stories dear to her heart about family, about home, about food in her stunning new book, Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands (Heyday). She partners with New York Times journalist Lawrence Downes and her friend and photographer Bill Steen to share her memories of life in Tucson, Arizona, and Sonora, Mexico, the place to which her great-grandfather, Friedrich August Ronstadt, immigrated from Germany in the early 1840s. He eventually settled in Tucson, where the Ronstadt family became one of the scions of the community. Though Linda Ronstadt grew up “in middle-class comfort in twentieth-century Tucson, far removed from any need for desert self-sufficiency,” her world is animated by the Sonora of her great-grandparents, and her love of the desert, its raw beauty and its food, flows through her blood. As she writes, “The Río Sonora region is one of the prettiest corners of Mexico, a landscape. Etched by sunlight and carved by wind and softened by lush evergreens. This stretch of desert happens to be my foothold in the world. I believe in genetic memory, that sense of a place that lives in the bloodstream and passes down the generations. 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 roots in Sonora. I feel the pull from Banámichi like a summons from my father’s parents and their parents and grandparents, from a chain of ancestors, most of whom I never knew.”
Ronstadt vividly describes the harshness and beauty of this land, and her childhood memories of it. “Living in a harsh climate has its rewards. There’s something to be said for the way a land of extreme weather sharpens and stokes emotions in a way that blander environments can’t. In blazing heat, a well-timed passing cloud or the blessed whisper of a breeze feels like an answered prayer. There’s relief and almost drunken delight when summer’s unbearable grip is finally broken by the wild monsoons of July and August, or even just when the swamp-cooler (low-tech air conditioners that work through the cooling collision of evaporating water and very dry air) on the roof kicks in and the heat indoors retreats enough for your thoughts to solidify out of boiled mush.”
Never one to hold back her words, Ronstadt deplores the bigotry and racism that continue to infect her beloved part of the world, but she recalls that such attitudes are hardly new. “I know my father and uncles dealt with bigotry and racism as businessmen in twentieth-century Tucson … In the 1960s, when Tucson was pursuing literal erasure of Mexican identity, my dad and uncle Edward were among the Mexican American leaders who urged the city to save some its Hispanic past.” Today, in the midst of the violence and anti-immigrant racism in our country, especially at the southern border, she wonders what to do. “We can’t control how others feel about us,” she writes. “But we have a say in how we feel about ourselves. Rejecting being devalued is half the battle. We can work to be comfortable in our own skins, to carry ourselves knowing that we belong, that this land is our land.”
Music can play a role, reflects Ronstadt, in providing strength for individuals and communities to embrace one’s identity, even in the face of hatred and racism. “And this is what music and art can do. When you tap into the strength of those who came before you, those who
took their love and suffering and made it music, you become strong and resilient, too … When I made the album Canciones de Mi Padre, singing Mexican songs in Spanish, it wasn’t as radical departure as some made it out to be. I simply wanted to take my singing in a direction I had long wanted to go, to finally perform the songs I’d learned as a girl. It was an artistic project, not a political one. But inevitably my identity became a part of it, and while some white critics initially dismissed the album as trivial exotica, the sturdy and beautiful songs spoke for themselves. The records sold by the ton … It was thrilling and humbling to see Mexican Americans young and old embrace the records as a source of community pride — not that they needed any reason from me to feel proud of their roots and musical heritage. I felt proud to be able to honor my father and aunt Luisa and our shared Sonoran roots.”
Food is also a way of bringing communities together, and has as much power as place does to define family. Scattered through the book are recipes for dishes that Ronstadt recalls from meals growing up and continues to make. Some are family recipes, such as Ronstadt Family Meatballs / Albondigas de le Familia Ronstadt, while others, like Tepary Beans / Frijoles Téparis, are ancient and obscure.
Feels Like Home issues an invitation to sit a while and listen as Ronstadt regales us with warm stories of the ones she loves, the places woven into the fabric of her being, and the food and music that sustain us all.
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Post by the Scribe on Nov 2, 2022 15:12:17 GMT
Who’s On The Today Show Wednesday November 2, 2022, on NBC www.memorabletv.com/episodes/whos-on-the-today-show-wednesday-november-2-2022-on-nbc/
The Today Show Wednesday November 2, 2022, on NBC; (7-9 a.m.) TODAY Exclusive: Terry Bradshaw Shares His Story on Fighting Cancer. Linda Ronstadt Shares Her Story of Growing Up Near Northern Sonora. TODAY Bestsellers: Beauty Bag Cleanse: Tips & Products with Makho Ndlovu. Cole Hauser and Kelly Reilly on Yellowstone.
(9-10 a.m.) On the Money: Countdown to Thanksgiving. She Made It: Sprinkles Cupcakes. Catching Up with Audra McDonald. Lopez Vs. Lopez with George Lopez and Mayan Lopez. What to Read with Mateo Askaripour.
Airdate: Wednesday November 2, 2022 at 7.00am on NBC.TODAY Linda Ronstadt opens up about health, career, Mexican heritage SHARE THIS - watch interview
www.today.com/video/linda-ronstadt-opens-up-about-career-health-mexican-heritage-152277061927
Music legend Linda Ronstadt sits down with Maria Shriver for a personal conversation about her five-decade career, living with progressive supranuclear palsy and how she is celebrating her Mexican heritage in her new memoir “Feels Like Home.” Nov. 2, 2022 CBS Sunday MorningLinda Ronstadt: A taste of homewww.cbsnews.com/video/linda-ronstadt-a-taste-of-home/
www.cbsnews.com/news/recipe-albondigas-de-la-familia-ronstadt-ronstadt-family-meatballs/Singer Linda Ronstadt has always done the unexpected. And now, the woman who admits that she can't cook has put out a memoir that is focused, in part, on traditional Sonoran recipes from her childhood. She talks with correspondent Tracy Smith about her book, "Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands."
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Post by the Scribe on Nov 24, 2022 12:54:13 GMT
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Post by the Scribe on Nov 24, 2022 12:58:52 GMT
Word S8.6 – What does the NEA Big Read program, NaNoWriMo and Linda Ronstadt have in common? kjzz.org/content/1826936/word-s86-what-does-nea-big-read-program-nanowrimo-and-linda-ronstadt-have-common By Tom Maxedon Published: Tuesday, November 22, 2022 - 5:05am Updated: Tuesday, November 22, 2022 - 9:30am
Listen to this KJZZ podcast about literature in Arizona and the region. media.kjzz.org/s3fs-public/Word-S8.6-Big_Read-NaNoWriMo-Linda_Ronstadt-2022-11-22.mp3?uuid=637f690af3ebd Audio icon Download mp3 (34.11 MB) EDITOR'S NOTE: The views expressed by guests featured in this program do not represent the editorial positions of KJZZ News nor its reporters and staff.
On this episode of KJZZ's Word, the application window for the National Endowment for the Arts' Big Read grants is open. www.arts.gov/initiatives/nea-big-read
Plus, National Novel Writing Month, known as NaNoWriMo, is winding down and writers are feverishly trying to finish 50,000 words by Nov. 30.
Finally, music icon and one of Arizona’s beloved daughters, Linda Ronstadt, has a new memoir.
Guest list
Josh Feist is director of grant making at Arts Midwest, one of six nonprofit arts agencies in the country that helps facilitate the NEA Big Read program.
The Intent to Apply deadline for grants is Wednesday, Jan. 18, 2023.
For their project, applicants will choose one of 15 books representing a diverse range of contemporary themes, voices and perspectives. More information on the books and authors, as well as discussion questions and videos, are available.
KMUW-Witchita, KS
KMUW, Wichita's local NPR station, hosted "Wichitalks" on April 29, 2022, as part of the NEA Big Read grant program. The NEA Big Read welcomes applications from a variety of eligible organizations, including first-time applicants; organizations serving communities of all sizes, including rural and urban areas; and organizations with small, medium or large operating budgets. Eligible applicants include, but are not limited to:
Arts centers, arts councils, and arts organizations Colleges and universities Libraries and literary centers Community service organizations, environmental organizations, and faith-based organizations Museums and historical societies School districts and local education agencies Tribal governments and nonprofits Applicant organizations will collaborate with a broad range of partners — including a community library if the applicant itself is not a library — to offer events and activities that engage the whole community.
Potential applicants may sign up for 15-minute consultations with Arts Midwest staff and review sample applications. Access the guidelines for more details. u7061146.ct.sendgrid.net/ls/click?upn=4tNED-2FM8iDZJQyQ53jATUUa1iNcu-2B7oky9keOeH2bNn3HUjiP-2BOLie6EoL4DaxLbQ0Rx95ZPf0TCi1tUIjD8gr57CAODmRGs-2Bzgb-2FhbKIyM-3DOVLs_VdZI-2Ff2-2BSGsf8hyH8aL1-2FleCHM0-2FsGPPOZdwljoQAbYoF-2BY13UlFNbZJVUxEWUgJ4umgjYBnPck4sYLhCGFrO-2FStuQ1CfW5nPYzscAfjgGgY6fWI966PiLwEboJtGlZkPm8-2FVW9wG0h-2FR7ey4YhlcR8AA6qE9emVnWoxvpkzCUZkmLi-2Bf1RwsKkfATMQKqCxY47qypWgxdcb6rPw6zjmh4sIy-2BRHjfGyentnY7UNs5EJuxwABzl5IdHl5IAUcSZ-2FcQn6wqRny4wulkCVK9FULx-2FMwB9mcegSXsgsSK4z-2BLNQSTZX0DedcvO7sJceNrWAcYkSOcsP1q95H6KVLWufeSr-2B1q4o9siJJOJ-2FO-2FPa1bo-3D
Erin Lorandos Erin Lorandos is a municipal librarian in the Valley and NaNoWriMo enthusiast.
NaNoWriMo is winding down and writers are feverishly trying to finish 50,000 words by Nov. 30th.
On our last episode, we talked to one Valley municipal liaison (ML) for the annual contest about her efforts to help others hit that mark as well as her own project.
As we count down the remaining days in November, we caught up with another ML, Erin Lorandos.
Originally from Wisconsin, Lorandos is a librarian and writer living in Phoenix. She primarily writes poetry, but no genre is off limits and has participated in NaNoWriMo with varying degrees of success for a number of years. nodiffjournal.com/read/
Linda Rondstadt.com Linda Ronstadt is from Tucson.
Our final guest on this episode is a beloved musician from Tucson. In October, Linda Ronstadt released “Feels Like Home,” a memoir which includes photos by Bill Steen and also recipes, just in time for the holidays if you’re feeling like trying a Sonoran staple.
Ronstadt wrote the book in collaboration with Lawrence Downes a writer and editorial board member of the New York Times. When we talked recently, I was curious how the memoir came to fruition as well as how Downes became involved with the project.
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Portions of “Word” have been nominated for Edward R. Murrow and Public Media Journalists Association awards.
If you're not yet a member of KJZZ, that's ok. Please consider a monthly gift of $10, $20 or $30 per month to reliably sustain the fact-based journalism and original podcasts you expect and enjoy.
Email us with a comment about this episode or a suggestion for a future one. tmaxedon@kjzz.org
Thanks so much for supporting literature in Arizona and the region!
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