I never thought I would hear Linda Ronstadt sing again, but there she is on my television screen, singing a traditional Mexican cancione with a nephew and cousin. It is, she explains, a family thing that she doesn’t want them doing without her.  She stops to find a note, they resume, and when the song finishes, she looks at the camera – right at me – and says, with a no-bullshit candor:

This isn’t really singing. Believe me. It’s a few notes sketched in. But it’s not really singing.

And, I am in tears. I bet I’m not alone.

I’ve been cheated.

On Monday, work will take me back to Tucson, Linda Ronstadt’s hometown. At some point, I’ll notice the Ronstadt Street sign, and I will think about her and her beautiful voice and her political statements, including a recent – and right on – jab at Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo at a reception celebrating her and the other 2019 Kennedy Center honorees.

Reportedly, when he invoked one of her most famous songs to ask when he would be loved, she decided to answer him: ” I’d like to say to Mr. Pompeo, who wonders when he’ll be loved, it’s when he stops enabling Donald Trump.”  

“They said it was rude for me to insert politics into the ceremony, but I think it’s rude to put little children in cages.”

It is.

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Watching the documentary about her life, The Sound of my Voice, I am simultaneously rewinding the tapes in my head to find her on The Old Grey Whistle Test belting out “When Will I be Loved?” I am a teenager and bored, wishing I was in America, wishing I was just like Linda Ronstadt. She was my girl crush. 

She was everybody’s crush, and they are all here to testify. Dolly Parton. Emmylou Harris. Glenn Frey. Don Henley. Aaron Neville. JD Souther. Jackson Browne.

Like her, they know she can’t sing like that anymore, and – like her – they also know it is unlikely that anyone will ever sing like that again. 

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 Linda Ronstadt released the Prisoner in Disguise album I was 12 years old and living in Antrim, Northern Ireland. . By the time I moved out to go to college in Belfast, I knew by heart the lyrics of every song she covered. When that 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 in a way that will be familiar to many women:

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 glorious 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 she 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. As far as I was concerned, she 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 occasional flower in my hair. I wanted 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 Ronstadt’s music over the PA system to drown out our noise.

People arrived from all over these United States, from as far away as New York, Chicago, and Washington D.C. carrying signs bearing 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, 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.

More than a decade later, our immigration policies are 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 the 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.

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