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Linda Ronstadt

A Reason To Smile

Dan Rather and Team Steady Sep 29

Credit: Getty Images

I was riding through downtown Austin this week when Linda Ronstadt’s “Blue Bayou” came on the radio. And I was reminded how beautiful her voice is. She and her majestic pipes are this week’s reason to smile. 

Ronstadt’s accolades and awards are almost too numerous to list. She is a multi-genre, multiplatinum singer with multiple Grammys, a member of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and a Kennedy Center honoree with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (to name a few).

Ronstadt may be best known for her rock-and-roll canon, but she also recorded Latin music, American standards, opera, and my personal favorite of hers, country.  

In this clip, she sings “The Sweetest Gift” in gorgeous harmony with her friends Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris. 

Several years later, the three superstars would record the album “Trio.” If you haven’t heard that or the second album they released together, I highly recommend you seek them out.

I had the privilege to speak with Ms. Ronstadt on “The Big Interview” for AXS-TV. Here is a snippet of that interview, in which she extols the virtues of the great American songbook and explains her turn to her Mexican musical roots.

Whatever genre she sings, Ronstadt fully embodies and embraces it. “Music is meant to lighten your load. By singing it, you release the sadness and release yourself, an exercise in exorcism. You exorcise that emotion and diminish sadness and feel joy,” she once said.