The name Linda Ronstadt is music to our ears in Tucson and we will be able to hear her voice in person next month.
Not in song, mind you, but in conversation when she visits the Tucson Festival of Books March 5 at the University of Arizona.
She and co-author Lawrence Downes will discuss her recently published memoir: “Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands.”
The book is written in Ronstadt’s voice and explores her life in Tucson before the hits, magazine covers and Grammys, to a slower, simpler time. Released Oct. 4, it quickly disappeared from every bookshop in Tucson, but publisher Heyday Books said copies should again be available this coming week.
A graduate of Catalina High School, Ronstadt exploded on America’s pop music scene in the late 1960s. In an era that co-starred the Beatles and Rolling Stones, she was one of the most famous entertainers in the world.
Now consider this: She flashed onto the bestseller list again two weeks ago, simply because “Long Long Time” — first released in 1970 — was played in a segment on a new HBO series called “The Last of Us.”
No one is suggesting the songstress has embarked on a second career as an author, but Downes said she’s a natural.
Linda Ronstadt singing with her father, Gilbert, at Mariachi Espectacular on April 24, 1987, at Tucson Community Center.
“She has an incredible grasp of the language,” he said. “Her musical ear is also a literary ear. She could have been a terrific writer, too.”
Ronstadt and Downes began plotting “Feels Like Home” in 2018. Originally, it was to be a cookbook.
“My dear pal CC Goldwater, Barry’s granddaughter, asked me, of all people, to write a cookbook with her on Southwest food,” Ronstadt explained. “Eventually, we realized there wasn’t enough for a cookbook, but we thought there must be a book there someplace.”
“Feels Like Home” still has Ronstadt family recipes, 20 of them, but it evolved into much more. Most poignantly, it features stories about her childhood in Tucson.
One of them: Ronstadt’s first horse was a Shetland pony named Murphy. During the summer, she would bring him into the house to avoid the heat … and share her ice cream.
Another: She was first serenaded by mariachis at age 12, in Guadalajara, when vacationing with the Cele Peterson family.
And this: “I don’t speak very good Spanish. Since I could always sing it, it was always more natural for me to sing it than speak it.”
It was a different time and Tucson a different place in the 1950s and ’60s. The Ronstadts had horses they would ride down the Rillito River, toward Sonora.
Linda Ronstadt signs autographs at Tucson's Symphony Cotillion Ball in 1977.
Today? Their home near East Prince Road and North Tucson Boulevard is now considered the city’s north side, surrounded by thousands of others.
Tucson was strictly segregated but the Ronstadts, with bloodlines to Germany and Mexico, moved easily across the line.
“Mexican farmers and ranchers were a big part of my father’s business, Ronstadt Hardware,” Ronstadt said. “Sometimes we would all drive into Sonora and sing harmonies in the car on the way. All of us sang. We sang all the time.”
Readers of Ronstadt’s memoir will learn a lot about her, obviously, but we learn a lot about Tucson, too. She and Downes did not scrimp on their research. Together they explore the experiences shared for generations by Sonorans on both sides of the line.
“Connections between Tucson and Sonora went deep,” Ronstadt said. “For a long time, Southern Arizona was Sonora. When I was growing up, the border station was still just a small building with a turnstile.”
These things are part of her now, and they explain her appeal on both sides of the border.
Here in Tucson, the Linda Ronstadt Music Hall is home to the Tucson Symphony Orchestra and the Arizona Opera Company.
Tucson native, Emmy and Grammy winner Linda Ronstadt honored at a ceremony before the International Mariachi Conference's Espectacular Concert with the renaming of the Tucson Music Hall as The Linda Ronstadt Music Hall. Video by Kelly Presnell / Arizona Daily Star
The women’s softball team at UA has played Ronstadt’s recording of “Palomita de Ojos Negros” before the first inning of every home game since 1993.
When “The Sound of My Voice” played at Loft Cinema in 2019, the documentary ran for a near-record 17 weeks.
Even from San Francisco, she feels the warmth from her hometown.
“I don’t have a place in there anymore,” Ronstadt said, “I sold my home there six or seven years ago. But Tucson remains in my thoughts and in my heart. The nostalgic shadow the place casts on me grows only longer from being farther away.”
In many ways, “Feels Like Home” is a love letter to all of us, an ode to the people and places that shaped her life before packing her bags for Los Angeles in 1964.
“Tucson remains my point of origin, the center of my soul,” she confessed. “Everything else radiates out from there.”
The book festival session with Ronstadt and Downes is scheduled for Sunday, March 5, at 1 p.m. It will be in the Student Union Ballroom.
