At 79, Linda Ronstadt no longer speaks with the urgency of a performer chasing an audience. In a rare and intimate interview, she speaks softly, her voice shaped by time and Parkinson’s disease, reflecting not on her own stardom but on the six singers she says built her. She calls the conversation less about influence and more about gratitude, naming the voices she carried with her from childhood. The first name she offers is Billie Holiday.
Ronstadt says Holiday’s singing was confessional rather than performative, emotion stripped of pretense. As a child in Tucson, she listened late at night, trying to imitate the way Holiday bent time and made silence feel meaningful. Decades later, Ronstadt says she still carried that emotional honesty into her own ballads. Holiday, she says, invented pop singing.
“Everyone after her, me included, was following her path. ”
The second voice was Frank Sinatra, who Ronstadt describes as an architect of phrasing. Where Holiday taught her intimacy, Sinatra taught her structure and restraint. In her twenties, she studied his records closely, tracing the shape of his breath and the weight of each pause.
When she later recorded standards like *What’s New*, she says she was trying to honor his blueprint without copying it. “He showed me that the best singers don’t chase the song, they invite it in. ”
Ronstadt then turns to Maria Callas, whom she calls “the greatest chick singer ever. ” She discovered opera in her late teens and was drawn not to Callas’s technical precision but to her dramatic, fearless commitment.
She says Callas taught her that genre doesn’t matter, only conviction. That permission helped Ronstadt move across country, pop, mariachi, and jazz without apology. “She taught me to be messy, to be theatrical, to take up space,” Ronstadt says. “I owe her my freedom.
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The fourth influence was Lola Beltrán, the queen of mariachi. For Ronstadt, Beltrán was not merely a musical inspiration but an inheritance. She grew up hearing rancheras on her father’s radio, voices of Mexico woven into family life. Beltrán’s powerful, unpolished singing gave Ronstadt permission to sing from the gut.
In 1987, she released *Canciones de Mi Padre*, a Spanish-language mariachi album that many warned would fail. Ronstadt says the project was a love letter to her roots. “She made the world come to her. ”
Hank Williams came through the radio like a ghost, Ronstadt recalls.
His plain-spoken, sorrowful songs made sadness sound simple, and that honesty shaped how she approached her own country material. She says she tried to let the pain sit without decoration. Williams’s willingness to show fragility, especially as a male artist in his era, also mattered deeply to her. “He showed me that country music wasn’t about rhinestones,” she says.
“It was about broken hearts and the courage to sing about them. ”
The final voice was Phil Everly. Ronstadt says his tenor blended with his brother Don’s baritone in a way that felt like belonging. She studied his instinct for harmony, knowing when to step forward and when to disappear.
Her hit version of “When Will I Be Loved” was meant to honor the spirit of the Everly Brothers’ original. She says Phil taught her that harmony is about empathy, not competition, and that music is a conversation rather than a solo. Together, these six artists formed what Ronstadt calls the unseen thread of her career. Though they spanned jazz, opera, ranchera, country, and harmony duos, she sees them as one story told six ways.
“What ties them together isn’t music,” she says. “It’s emotion, it’s honesty, it’s fearlessness. ” She credits them with giving her permission to cross genres, take risks, and leave tears in the middle of a note. Ronstadt acknowledges that fans will remember her for songs like “Blue Bayou,” “You’re No Good,” and “Desperado.
” But she hopes listeners also remember what was underneath those songs, the echoes of the six voices stitched into every note. She says she never set out to copy them, but she never sang without them either. Their influence, she explains, was in her DNA. Now, with her singing voice silenced by the disease, Ronstadt says she can still hear them, especially late at night.
She hopes younger singers learn not to imitate but to listen, to embrace discomfort and complexity, and to let music be both messy and magnificent. “Don’t sing to be liked,” she says. “Sing to tell the truth, even if your voice shakes. ”
She does not want to be remembered as a pioneer, she says, but as a bridge between languages, traditions, and voices that dared to feel.
Her message to the next generation is simple: these six artists taught her how to sing without armor, and that is all she ever wanted to do. “They taught me that you don’t have to be loud to be heard,” she says. “You just have to mean it.
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