Some Like It Soft

Blending blues, folk and country Linda Ronstadt was the seventies’ biggest-selling female. Nigel Williamson pays tribute to the queen of soft rock

- Nigel Williamson

To some, 1977 will always be punk’s annus mirabilis, the year an insurrection led by the Sex Pistols and Clash challenged rock’s old guard and changed the face of popular music forever. Yet it would be just as legitimate to claim 1977 as the high tide of soft-rock, a year in which the taking-it-easy trio of the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac and Linda Ronstadt held the number one position in the American albums chart for a total of 42 weeks between them.

Throughout the seventies Ronstadt was the queen of soft-rock, a genre which applied the confessional modes of the singer-songwriter to a smooth and melodic presentation that incorporated elegant harmonies, studio perfectionism and musical virtuosity while blending elements of folk, blues and country with an insidious rock and roll backbeat. The style delivered canonical albums to a huge audience, which appreciated their sonic subtleties on increasingly high-quality audio systems – and had the disposable income to buy such records in vast quantities.

Ronstadt boasted neither the songcraft of Carole King nor the poetic genius of Joni Mitchell and she only ever recorded three of her own compositions in her entire career. Her voice – which spanned seven octaves – was less country than Emmylou Harris and not as bluesy as Bonnie Raitt. Yet as a stylist she combined elements of them all to become California’s hip first lady of song – quite literally, given that for much of the seventies she was dating state governor Jerry Brown.

Between 1974 and 1980 Ronstadt scored seven consecutive multi-platinum albums and 13 singles in the American top 40, eight of them in the top 10. She appeared on the covers of Newsweek and Time and during this golden era only Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles – who owed their very existence to Ronstadt – sold more records.