Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast; Getty
“They all know me from The Muppet Show,” Linda Ronstadt cracks when I mention the twentysomethings in my house who represent just the latest generation of fans to discover the music she made that soundtracked so much of the 1970s and ’80s.
Of course, Linda Ronstadt was a global superstar during the Golden Age of rock and roll—notably the first woman to headline arena tours, earning her the nickname “First Lady of Rock”—who went on to make a series of massive-selling Trio albums with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris, before she took a decided left turn and recorded three American Songbook albums with the big band leader Nelson Riddle, and then embraced her Mexican heritage in a very big way, recording a series of Mariachi-inspired Spanish language albums, at a time when her record label thought the move was career suicide.
Those albums, however, went on to sell millions and earn the icon multiple Grammys. It’s something, as Ronstadt recounts in her memoir, Simple Dreams, from 2013, that she’s enormously proud of. They also paved the way for her new book, Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands, out now. Chock-full of the Mexican ranch recipes Ronstadt learned at home, it also recalls a time before walls and politics had driven a wedge between a culture she remembers as “fluid,” when the Southwest was communal rather than rife with cultural conflict.