Linda Maria Ronstadt (born July 15, 1946) is an American singer who performed and recorded in diverse genres including rock, country, light opera, the Great American Songbook, and Latin music.
She has earned 11 Grammy Awards, three American Music Awards, two Academy of Country Music awards, an Emmy Award, and an ALMA Award. Many of her albums have been certified gold, platinum or multiplatinum in the United States and internationally. She has also earned nominations for a Tony Award and a Golden Globe award. She was awarded the Latin Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award by the Latin Recording Academy in 2011 and also awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award by the Recording Academy in 2016. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in April 2014. On July 28, 2014, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts and Humanities. In 2019, she received a star jointly with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for their work as the group Trio. Ronstadt was among five honorees who received the 2019 Kennedy Center Honors for lifetime artistic achievements.
Ronstadt has released 24 studio albums and 15 compilation or greatest hits albums. She charted 38 US Billboard Hot 100 singles. Twenty-one of those singles reached the top 40, ten reached the top 10, and one reached number one ("You're No Good"). Ronstadt also charted in UK as two of her duets, "Somewhere Out There" with James Ingram and "Don't Know Much" with Aaron Neville, peaked at numbers 8 and 2 respectively and the single "Blue Bayou" reached number 35 on the UK Singles charts. She has charted 36 albums, ten top-10 albums, and three number 1 albums on the US Billboard Pop Album Chart.
Ronstadt has collaborated with artists in diverse genres, including: Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Bette Midler, Billy Eckstine, Frank Zappa, Carla Bley (Escalator Over the Hill), Rosemary Clooney, Flaco Jiménez, Philip Glass, Warren Zevon, Gram Parsons, Neil Young, Paul Simon, Earl Scruggs, Johnny Cash, and Nelson Riddle. She has lent her voice to over 120 albums and has sold more than 100 million records, making her one of the world's best-selling artists of all time. Christopher Loudon, of Jazz Times, wrote in 2004 that Ronstadt is "blessed with arguably the most sterling set of pipes of her generation."
Ronstadt reduced her activity after 2000 when she felt her singing voice deteriorating. She released her final solo album in 2004 and her final collaborative album in 2006 and performed her final live concert in 2009. She announced her retirement in 2011 and revealed shortly afterwards that she is no longer able to sing as a result of a degenerative condition initially diagnosed as Parkinson's disease but later determined to be progressive supranuclear palsy.[25][a] Since then, Ronstadt has continued to make public appearances, going on a number of public speaking tours in the 2010s. She published an autobiography, Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir, in September 2013. A documentary based on her memoirs, Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice, was released in 2019.
According to Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller, in 1974 during the early planning stages of what would become SNL (and prior to Lorne Michaels coming on board), Linda Ronstadt was among those being considered as an ongoing co-host for the series, with one proposal seeing her paired with Steve Martin.
Her first SNL appearance, on March 19, 1977, was a cameo as a member of Gilda Radner's backing group the "Rhondettes" performing the song "Goodbye, Saccharin." She later returned several times as a musical guest, with the first being May 19, 1979 when she performed two duets with Phoebe Snow of songs she never recorded herself. In 1980, Ronstadt branched out into other realms of music, receiving a Tony nomination for appearing in a revival of the light opera, The Pirates of Penzance. In a change of pace for SNL, Ronstadt and the cast of Pirates were the musical guests on December 20, 1980.
Later in the 1980s, Ronstadt continued to change her musical style, recording a trilogy of albums of big band-era standards with Nelson Riddle and a further trilogy of Spanish-language albums, as well as a popular collaboration with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris called "Trio". Her final SNL appearances were a duet with Aaron Neville and a performance with the group The Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán; Ronstadt never appeared on SNL as a strictly solo performer.
Ronstadt continued to perform and record in various genres of music until 2011 when the onset of what was later diagnosed as Progressive supranuclear palsy forced her to retire from performing. Since then she has written a book about her musical heritage, and was featured in an acclaimed documentary about her life.
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