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Rating: Everyone loved Linda Ronstadt, everyone loves Linda Ronstadt.
With that very hard, German surname, no one imagines that the young girl, not even twenty years old, performing in a trio in Los Angeles venues in the mid-'60s, is half Mexican and half from Chicago. But her energetic and carefree spirit, the folk repertoire of a borderland like her native Arizona, reveal that young Linda is not Mexican on her mother's side but her father's. Despite that German surname, her father is Mexican but descends from a grandfather who emigrated to Mexico in the mid-19th century from Germany. Mexico, its songs will return in Linda's life more than once. This documentary film is the tribute that Oscar winners Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman pay to one of the most versatile voices the rock world has ever known and which unfortunately has been almost completely silenced by Parkinson's disease, which has afflicted Linda for years, a genetic variant and in fact also her maternal grandmother suffered from it. Linda Ronstadt explored in her albums a significant portion of the Central and North American musical heritage. She never recorded her own pieces but contributed by rearranging old songs like the well-known "Lo Siento Mi Vida". Raised on a ranch in Arizona, she lived and breathed music from an early age, her foundations rooted in the American standards her mother listened to and the traditional Mexican songs of her father, a great tenor singer. The film flows smoothly, retracing the golden years of the Troubadour and her early solo recordings at Capitol Studios in Los Angeles. Linda's repertoire spans and draws from the songbooks of not-yet-famous Warren Zevon, Jackson Browne, and her backing band during the early tours would become the Eagles. These were the years of David Geffen's Asylum Records, the freedom to record, dreaming while making music. Los Angeles burst with sounds, Linda filled arenas across the States thanks to best sellers like "Heart Like a Wheel" (1974), "Hasten Down the Wind" (1976), "Silk Purse" (1970) with the iconic cover showing Linda with some piglets in a pen, and in 1977 she demolished the world charts with her version of "It's So Easy" by Buddy Holly. Peter Asher, just out of the Beatles' Apple Records, produced her albums which were almost all recorded at the legendary Sound Factory in Hollywood, Los Angeles. At the beginning of the '80s the turning point came, first with operetta in theaters on the East Coast and then with the recovery of old American standards in a very beautiful trilogy whose aim was "to save those songs from elevators". The tribute to her Mexican roots would come later as would the collaboration in the Trio with Parton and Harris. Considered crazy for wanting to record an album of Mexican songs, "Canciones de Mi Padre" would become one of the best-selling non-English-language albums in music history. Testimonies from all the protagonists of her career thus pay tribute to Linda and her bold, free-spirited musical choices, touching on Emmylou Harris's tears at the memory of the nuances of her friend's voice now almost entirely lost. Linda narrates the documentary and appears at the end with her nephew, singing one of her beloved Mexican songs in a final testament to the beauty of the sound of her voice.
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