Linda Ronstadt

This is the 101st post in our Musician of the Day series.



Linda Ronstadt was born in 1946 in Arizona. Linda's family was filled with music and tradition and this played a major direction in the tone of her professional music. She was 14 when she formed a folk trio with her brother and sister. The group played coffeeshops and small venues but Linda wanted much more, and she wanted a way to merge rock and folk. So at the age of 17 she moved to L.A.

In L.A. she joined the group The Stone Poneys, From 1967 - 1968 the band released three albums but they broke up soon after the release of their third album. Linda then went on tour with Kenny Edwards who had also been a member of The Stone Poneys.

In 1969 she released her first solo album, Hand Sown...Home Grown, and it was considered the first alternative country record by a female artist. She released another album in 1970 and earned her first Grammy nomination.

Linda went on tour with all the greats of the period and continued releasing albums. Many of them went platinum and Linda became an icon of the 1970s. By 1978 Rolling Stone declared her "America's best-known female rock singer."

In 1980 when she was considered the highest paid woman in rock she decided to try her hand at Broadway and took the lead in a number of performances. She even won a Tony Award.

Since then Linda has branched out to try different genres including Jazz.

To date Linda has won 11 Grammy awards (the most recent in 1999) and has released more than 20 albums (the most recent in 2004).

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This got even worse in the mid-1980s when she found herself engaged to the one and only George Lucas.