The radio reminded me that it was Linda Ronstadt’s 73rd birthday yesterday. Driving back from Tucson, her hometown, and listening to the DJ tell us that in these parts she is now better known for covering traditional mariachi songs and political appearances as a political activist,  I rewind the tapes in my head and there she is on The Old Grey Whistle Test belting out “When Will I be Loved?” This is very long ago. I’m 16 and bored and wishing I was in America, wishing I was just like Linda Ronstadt. She was my girl crush. 

Today, Linda Ronstadt can’t sing like that. She can’t sing at all. 

I first found out that she had Parkinson’s disease in an interview with AARP magazine,

No one can sing with Parkinson’s disease.  No matter how hard you try.

In her memoir, Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir, Ronstadt writes that “people sing for many of the same reasons the birds sing. They sing for a mate, to claim their territory, or simply to give voice to the delight of being alive in the midst of a beautiful day.” This was why Linda Ronstadt sang.

Past tense.

When I was a girl, I wanted to be a rock ‘n’ roll singer. I had crazy dreams of hanging out with Whispering Bob on The Old Grey Whistle Test. I really did. I was 12 years old and living in Antrim, Northern Ireland, when Linda Ronstadt released the Prisoner in Disguise album. By the time I moved out to go to college in Belfast, I knew by heart the lyrics of every song she covered. When her voice rang out from Downtown Radio, I sang along, deluding myself that I was within her range. She covered the best of everything – Motown, soul, country, folk, rock – and she exposed me to the musicians who would score the soundtrack of my life. I think I bought all Little Feat’s albums because she covered their songs, and I only liked the Eagles because they were her backing vocalists. The Eagles were her backing vocalists. And even though they worked for her, she lacked confidence.

I got tougher being on the road with the Eagles. I walked differently, I became more foulmouthed.  I swore so much I sounded like a truck driver. But that’s the way it was. I was the only girl on the road so the boys always kind of took charge. They were working for me, and yet it always seemed like I was working for them.

Listening to her records, I would never have imagined the woman behind that heartsome voice could know vulnerability or inadequacy. I should know better. Moving through the world to the beat of a different drum is not always easy.  And, before the Silence Breakers were featured on the cover of Time magazine in 2017, helping galvanize the #MeToo movement, Linda Ronstadt had already spoken out, sharing the story of what happened when one of the producers on the Johnny Cash show called her to share notes about her performance. When he offered to come to her hotel room, she turned him down, but then relented, believing he just loved her work and wanted to help her.

 I should have followed my first instinct . . . because as soon as he entered my room and closed the door, he removed every stitch of clothing he was wearing.

When she threatened to call security, “he said no one would believe me because of the way I looked and dressed (jeans, long, straight hair, and no bra in the panty-girdle, big-hair South).”

No one would believe her. Of course no one would believe her. #MeToo

I loved everything I knew about her. Mostly her voice. It was all-American, and I wanted to be an American girl.  I imitated her accent (the way everyone not from America can sing in an American accent), singing along as she covered, with gusto, Neil Young’s Love is a Rose, Little Feat’s “Roll um Easy,” or – what would eventually become a kind of anthem for my own life, Different Drum.   Linda Ronstadt was the reason for my big hoop earrings, the perm I didn’t need, the shirts tied at the waist, off the shoulder peasant blouses, and the odd flower in my hair. I wanted to be her, to stride onstage in a mini-skirt with a tambourine and belt out Poor, Poor Pitiful Me, leaving the Eagles gobsmacked. Or maybe it would be Lowell George’s “Willin” on The Old Grey Whistle Test, the song that still plays in my head every time I see truck drivers pulling into the weigh station this side of the California border:

When I traded Northern Ireland for America and settled in Arizona, I remember feeling a tiny thrill that I had landed in the state where Linda Ronstadt lived, but I never got to see her perform. After suffering those early symptoms of Parkinson’s, she performed her final concert in 2009.  Still, our paths almost crossed. And, it had nothing to do with music but everything to do with America.

On the morning of January 16, 2010, more than twenty thousand of us gathered in Phoenix to march from Falcon Park to Sheriff Joe Arpaio‘s Tent City. We were there, in peace, to raise our voices against the Maricopa County Sheriff Office’s immigration tactics, and the indiscriminate attacks and raids against undocumented immigrants living in Maricopa County. True to form, “America’s toughest sheriff” was unfazed and announced that, from inside his jail, officials would play music over the PA system to drown out our noise – Linda Ronstadt’s music.

People arrived from all over these United States, from as far away as New York, Chicago, and Washington D.C. We carried signs that bore simple messages of humanity: “We are Human” “and “Stop the Hate.”

Leading us in that march, among others, was heroic United Farm Workers union leader and activist for the rights of farm workers and women, Dolores Huerta, who made an impassioned plea for the removal of officials like Sheriff Arpaio, and as she spoke to the growing yet quietening  crowd. As she spoke, I noticed a group of students from Brophy Prep, a local Catholic boy’s school. Bent in prayer, in support of their immigrant peers, they lifted my heart.

And by her side, was Linda Ronstadt.  She led us all the way to Tent City, urging everyone to be peaceful. And we were.

I’m here because I’m an Arizonan. I was born in Arizona. My father was born in Arizona. My grandmother was born in Arizona. I love Arizona, and Sheriff Arpaio is bad for Arizona. He’s making Arizona look bad because he’s profiling and he’s applying the law in an uneven and unjust way, and that weakens the law for all of us.

Almost a decade later, our immigration policies still in shambles, and Ronstadt is still an ally for the most vulnerable immigrants among us, encouraging her fans to join her in supporting the work of No More Deaths – No Más Muertes an advocacy group committed to ending the deaths of undocumented immigrants crossing the desert near the USA-Mexico border. As temperatures soar above 100 degrees on these hottest days of the year, Ronstadt asks that we give generously to help provide food, water, and aid to migrants facing the most treacherous of desert conditions.  An avid supporter of all humanitarian aid activists along the US-Mexico border and a member of Green Valley Samaritans, she knows and understands the brutal conditions of the desert and the plight of migrants who try to cross it. She also knows what America should do to help them.

Earlier this year, she wrote:

“I can think of no more compelling crisis than that now facing the borderlands and my view is this: Every individual has the right to receive and the right to give humanitarian aid, in order to prevent suffering and death – no matter what one’s legal status. To criminalize human kindness is a dangerous precedent.”

Speaking truth to power – as she has always done. Thank you, Linda Ronstadt. For all of it.

In peace, love, and solidarity – un abrazo fuerte.