(Credits: Far Out / Alamy / Linda Ronstadt)
Fri 20 March 2026 20:15, UK
Throughout every single decade of rock and roll, Linda Ronstadt never concerned herself with being one of the best composers in the world.
Her strong suit was in embodying every song she sang, and while it helps to speak from the heart whenever you get behind the microphone, it was much easier for her to make a song that spoke to her based on what someone else had written. No genre was off the table as long as she could picture herself singing it, but there are some songs that even some of her rock and roll friends would have killed to be able to write during their lifetime.
Then again, it’s not like Ronstadt was ever a snob about where her songs came from, either. She may have eventually graduated to making some of the best easy listening records of her time, but when looking through her early 1980s work, you could hear her slowly moving out of the country rock vein to focus on newer artists. Elvis Costello was just starting to come out of the woodwork, but chances are Ronstadt always had a friend in members of the Eagles, even after they broke up.
The California rockers wouldn’t have been making music were it not for Ronstadt, and even though Don Henley and Glenn Frey had gone their separate ways over the years, there was never any bad blood between them and the country rock Queen. She was still one of the finest singers that they had ever heard, and even when they left her band to form their own outfit, they were happy to contribute backing vocals when making her masterpieces like Heart Like A Wheel.
But it took Henley a while before they actually started to feel like they could make their own classics. They had been slogging it out on the road trying to get their tunes off the ground, but ‘Desperado’ was the kind of Americana song that worked perfectly for them. The whole thing felt like it was finely crafted in the same way those old Stephen Foster songs were, but Ronstadt felt that they had nothing on the real songwriting legends.
Sure, there were people like JD Souther trying to find that one song that could tug at people’s heartstrings, but when listening to Jimmy Webb’s tunes, Ronstadt would just about fall to pieces. He had a perfect sixth sense for what people wanted to hear out of country music, and while Ronstadt could be overwhelmed by the amount of great material in his arsenal, she felt that her friends had nothing on what Webb could do.
This was about the purest form of country music that anyone had ever attempted, and Ronstadt said that her friends would have traded anything to be able to write like him, saying, “He’s real sensitive because he took a lot of battering in the ’60s, when that hipper-than-thou thing was going on. Meanwhile, all these artists were admiring Jimmy’s music. Get Don Henley and J.D. Souther and Jackson Browne in the corner of the El Adobe Cafe and they’d be talking about what a great songwriter Jimmy Webb is and how they wish they had the guts to write a song that rhymes ‘adios,’ ‘morose,’ and ‘grandiose.’”
And you can definitely hear Henley searching for that same kind of magic later on in his career. There’s always an element of compromise to a lot of Eagles songs since you have to get four people to agree, but when Henley came out with Cass County, he seemed focused on making the kind of record that Webb would have been proud to have made, complete with some of the greatest Americana performances of the time.
So while the critics of the day may not have given that much time to Webb’s music, it was never about trying to please some music snob that didn’t know the first thing about the genre. This was for people who had gone through their own everyday struggles and felt like they had a friend through every single song that he worked on.
