After five unprecedented decades in the music industry, Linda Ronstadt announced her retirement from performing at the age of 65 in 2011.
A teenager in the mid 1960s, Ronstadt fronted the rock group Stone Poneys, scoring a Top 10 hit with Monkee Michael Nesmith’s hit song “Different Drum”.
After going solo in the early 1970s Ronstadt’s career skyrocketed to heights unequalled to this day by any other artist (including you Taylor).
Rock’s first major female touring artist, Ronstadt was the top-grossing solo female concert artist in the 1970s.
By the end of the decade she was the highest paid woman in Rock. In 1978 alone she made over $12 million with albums sales grossing over $60 million.
By 1979, Ronstadt had six platinum albums, three of which were number 1, numerous charting singles, eight gold albums and four multi-platinum certifications for her albums, an unprecedented feat at the time.
Certified seven times platinum in 2001, her 1976 Greatest Hits album sold consistently for over 25 years, selling over 7 million copies by the end of the millennium.
Three years after appearing on the cover of Time Magazine in 1977, Ronstadt made the cover of Rolling Stone for a record-setting sixth time.
Bored with rock by the early 80s, Ronstadt bravely abandoned the security of riches her career in pop music afforded her and underwent professional vocal training, appearing in both the Broadway and film versions of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance as well as playing the lead in Puccini’s opera La Boheme.
In 1983, against her record company’s wishes, Ronstadt turned her gaze towards the Great American Songbook.
Ten years earlier singer Harry Nilsson had attempted a similar project with limited success, along with Beatles drummer Ringo Starr three years earlier in 1970.
With arrangements by Frank Sinatra’s Capitol Records main man Nelson Riddle, Ronstadt went on to record a trilogy of standards albums: What’s New (1983) Lush Life (1984) and For Sentimental Reasons (1986).
The three albums achieved a combined sales total of nearly seven million copies in the U.S. alone.
Emboldened by the unexpected success of her standards trilogy, Ronstadt now had the clout at her record label to do pretty much anything she wanted.
That anything turned out to be a passion project honouring her Mexican-American heritage, the 1987 Canciones de Mi Padre album of traditional Mexican folk songs sung in Spanish.
The album went on to win her a Grammy Award for Best Mexican American Performance, selling over 2 million copies in the United States alone, making it the best-selling non-English-language album in U.S. music history.
In December 2020 Canciones de Mi Padre was inducted into the Grammy Hall Of Fame.
But perhaps Ronstadt’s bravest feat yet was making public her diagnosis of career ending Parkinson’s Disease in 2013 (later determined to be progressive supranuclear palsy) stating at the time that the progressive disease had left her unable to sing a note.
In 2014 she was inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame.
In 2018 Ronstadt bravely soldiered on embarking on a series of sold out speaking engagements titled A Conversation With Linda Ronstadt.
In 2019 she was selected as a Kennedy Center Honoree for a lifetime of contributions to American culture.
Most recently, in April of 2019, Oscar winning filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman released their critically acclaimed Grammy Award winning documentary Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice.
Over 100 million records sold worldwide
Platinum and Gold records as a member of Country Music royalty supergroup Trio alongside Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris
Country Music Association Award Winner
Academy Of Country Music Awards Winner
Arizona Music & Entertainment Hall of Fame Member
Trailblazer Award American Latino Media Arts Award (ALMA Award)
Lifetime Achievement Award Latin Grammy Awards
Artistic Director San Jose Mariachi and Mexican Heritage Festival
Honorary Doctorate of Music degree Berklee College of Music
Golden Globe Award Nominee
Tony Award Nominee
Emmy Award Winner
11 Grammy Awards
31 Gold and Platinum records
National Medal of the Arts
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Membership
Survivor
Rock N Roll AF