At 79, Linda Ronstadt no longer speaks about stardom, platinum records, or the stadiums she once filled. In a rare and deeply personal reflection, the legendary singer instead names the six voices she credits with building her as an artist. Speaking softly in an intimate setting with a single trusted interviewer, Ronstadt, whose career was silenced by Parkinson’s disease, describes the conversation not as a performance but as a tribute before silence. “This isn’t about influence,” she says.
“It’s about gratitude. ”
The first name she offers is Billie Holiday. Ronstadt remembers discovering Holiday as a child in Tucson, drawn not to jazz theory but to raw emotion. She describes Holiday’s singing as intimate and honest, like a confession from the next room.
Standing before her bedroom mirror as a girl, Ronstadt imitated Holiday’s phrasing and breath control, learning that singing could feel personal rather than perfect. “She invented pop singing,” Ronstadt says. “Everyone after her, me included, was following her path. ”
From Holiday, Ronstadt says she learned emotional intimacy; from Frank Sinatra, she learned structure.
She studied his records obsessively in her twenties, tracing the shape of his breath and the weight of his pauses. Sinatra, she explains, never pushed emotion but guided it, taking a simple lyric and making it feel like a novel. His influence shaped her later standards albums, including *What’s New* and *For Sentimental Reasons*. “I wasn’t trying to be Frank,” she says.
“I was trying to learn from him how to sing with grace. ”
Ronstadt’s third voice is opera legend Maria Callas, whom she calls “the greatest chick singer ever. Period. ” She discovered Callas in her late teens through a dusty recording given by a friend.
What struck her was not technical perfection but emotional abandon. “She didn’t sing like a bird,” Ronstadt recalls. “She sang like a woman on the verge of emotional collapse. ” Callas’s fearlessness gave Ronstadt permission to cross genres without apology, a spirit she says is present in her 1984 mariachi album *Canciones de Mi Padre*.
The fourth influence is Lola Beltrán, the queen of mariachi and a connection to Ronstadt’s Mexican heritage. Long before fame, Ronstadt was a girl in Tucson absorbing rancheras and boleros from her father’s radio. Beltrán’s voice, she says, could hold joy and grief at once. Her unapologetic presence gave Ronstadt the courage to release a Spanish-language mariachi record despite warnings it would hurt her career.
“She made the world come to her,” Ronstadt says. “Lola wasn’t just a singer. She was home. ”
Country singer Hank Williams came through the radio like a ghost, Ronstadt says, with a voice that was plain, worn, and unpolished.
He made sadness sound simple, and simplicity, she notes, is the hardest thing to achieve. His transparency about pain and fragility influenced how she interpreted country material like “Love Has No Pride” and “Silver Threads and Golden Needles. ” “He showed me that country music wasn’t about rhinestones,” she says. “It was about broken hearts and the courage to sing about them.
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The sixth voice is Phil Everly of the Everly Brothers. Ronstadt was hypnotized by the duo’s harmonies as a teenager, particularly Phil’s tenor and his instinct for knowing when to step forward and when to disappear. His approach shaped her own blend work, including her later duets with Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton. “He reminded me that music is a conversation, not a solo,” she says.
Ronstadt sees these six artists not as scattered influences but as one story told six ways. What connects them, she says, is honesty and fearlessness. They were truthtellers who refused to stay inside the lines, and their voices are stitched into every note she ever sang. She points to *Heart Like a Wheel* carrying Holiday’s ache, *What’s New* holding Sinatra’s precision, her mariachi work standing on Beltrán’s strength, and her ballads echoing Williams’s plain-spoken poetry.
Now, with her singing voice gone due to Parkinson’s disease, Ronstadt says she can still hear those six voices. She hopes younger singers learn not imitation but the courage to listen and to sing with truth. “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 but as a bridge between languages, traditions, and feelings. Her final message is simple: the legacy she leaves is not one of hits but of heart. “They taught me how to be honest in melody, how to sing without armor, how to feel out loud,” she says. “And that’s all I ever wanted to do.
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