Great singing voices: you need ‘em, I need ‘em, the world needs ‘em.

Put me down for Mike Patton, Sarah Vaughan, Frank Sinatra, Marvin Gaye, Nat ‘King’ Cole, Chaka Khan, Lewis Taylor, Donny and Lalah Hathaway, Leon Thomas, Al Green, Phyllis Hyman, Johnny Gill, etc. etc.

And Linda Ronstadt too. I was a big teenage fan of her live cameo in cult movie ‘FM’ (though possibly for reasons other than musical), loved her guest spot with Randy Newman at this October 1984 TV special and her work with Neil Young on Freedom, but it was only when I heard her 1987 album Canciones de mi Padre that it all came together.

It’s a collection of traditional Spanish-language songs that she heard as a kid growing up in Tucson, Arizona, only 45 minutes from the Mexican border (her father was of German, English and Mexican ancestry).

Produced by long-time manager/producer Peter Asher and with arrangements by Ruben Fuentes, it’s a gorgeous selection, with Ronstadt’s majestic voice rising above trumpets, violins, acoustic guitar, string bass and mariarchi vocals.

The album was a deeply personal project, as she told MOJO magazine in December 2018:

‘I knew those songs all my life and I wanted to sing them. I didn’t know the lyrics to most of them but my dad did – he was a big part of my research – and although I knew roughly what they were about, I had to learn what the Spanish meant. I had to really, really work to get it up to speed.’

Canciones de mi Padre was a huge success, winning a Grammy for Best Mexican/American Performance, and sold approximately two million copies in the USA (and ten million copies worldwide), making it the biggest-selling non-English-language album in Billboard history.

That’s pretty good for a beautiful album that Linda considers herself lucky to have been allowed to make at all, claiming she was only given a green light by Warners after her Nelson Riddle-composed/arranged For Sentimental Reasons was unexpectedly a big hit. She subsequently toured Canciones across the States in theatres, revue-style, and also recorded two further Spanish-language albums.

Ronstadt sadly retired from public performance in 2009 after a Parkinson’s Disease diagnosis. The recent, moving documentary ‘Sound Of My Voice’ explores her ’70 and ‘80s music, including the great collaborations with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris, and focuses on the Spanish-language albums too.