LINDA’S SONGS Southwest
Of the
These songs, some available on the new album Feels Like Home: Songs From the Sonoran Borderlands—Linda Ronstadt’s Musical Odyssey, are among the traditional tunes she fondly remembers hearing and singing with her family.
“El Sueño” (the dream) “My brothers, Peter and Mike, sang this beautiful huapango folk song with me on my record Mas Canciones. We learned the harmonies as kids from a record by Trío Tariácuri, three brothers who were beloved musicians in Mexico for decades, starting in the 1930s.”
“I Never Will Marry” “Dolly Parton and I both love this song and recorded it together. According to Ronstadt family rules, this was my sister’s song, because she was the first of us to sing it. But Suzy married three times, so it became mine.”
“El Crucifijo de Piedra” (the stone crucifix) “I learned this from the version sung by Miguel Aceves Mejía, the ranchera idol and actor. In it, an abandoned lover is crying in front of a church, so sad that the crucified Christ cries too. It’s one of the most beautiful songs in the literature.”
“Lo Siento Mi Vida” (I’m sorry my love) “Kenny Edwards [a longtime band member] and I wrote this with my dad. Kenny wanted it to be all in Spanish, but after he wrote the first line, we needed help for the rest. We told my dad what we wanted to say, and the song came together in a three-way phone conversation.” “Old Paint” “We sang this old cowboy song as kids. We never heard it on a record; it was just there, in the air. ‘The song smells of saddle leather,’ Carl Sandburg wrote of it in his 1927 folk-music anthology, The American Songbag. For my version on Simple Dreams, I played guitar myself, in my uniquely incompetent style.”