Linda Ronstadt

• 1. Introduction

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  Linda Ronstadt sings harmony on Under African Skies, a track on Paul Simon's album Graceland, and its second verse contains a line written for her. The line reads, "Take this child, Lord, from Tucson, Arizona...." Simon's tribute suits a musician who never categorized herself.

  Ronstadt lent her voice to more than 120 albums, working with partners as different as Frank Zappa, Philip Glass and Dolly Parton. Her own records moved between rock, folk, pop, country and soul. How does one performer end up at home in all of those styles? What did it cost to become the most famous woman in rock at a time when men still told women what to sing and what to wear? And what became of the voice itself?

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• 2. Tucson Roots And Influences

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  Linda Maria Ronstadt was born in Tucson on the 15th of July 1946, the third of four children. Her father, Gilbert, was a prosperous machinery merchant who ran the F. Ronstadt Co. Her mother, Ruth Mary, was a homemaker. The children grew up Roman Catholic on a 10 acre family ranch with her siblings Peter, Michael and Gretchen. Peter later served as Tucson's chief of police from 1981 to 1991. Family Circle magazine featured the family in 1953.

  Friedrich August Ronstadt, her great-grandfather, was an engineer from Hanover, Germany, who went by Federico Augusto. He moved first to Sonora, Mexico, and later to the Southwest in the 1840s, when that region was still part of Mexico. He married a Mexican citizen, Margarita Redondo y Vásquez, and eventually settled in Tucson. The library of the University of Arizona documents what the family gave the state, from wagon making and commerce to pharmacies and music.

  On the 16th of March 1991, Tucson opened its central transit terminal and dedicated it to her grandfather Federico José María Ronstadt. He was a wagon maker and pioneering businessman. His early contribution to the city's mobility was six mule-drawn streetcars, delivered in 1903-04.

  Her mother's father, Lloyd Groff Copeman, held nearly 700 patents. Ruth Mary, of German, English and Dutch ancestry, was raised in Flint, Michigan. Copeman invented an early electric toaster, many refrigerator devices, the grease gun, the first electric stove and an early form of the microwave oven. His flexible rubber ice cube tray alone earned him millions of dollars in royalties.

  By the age of 10, Ronstadt had heard every style she would later record, either sung by her family in the living room or played on the radio. The list runs from rock and roll and rhythm and blues to gospel, opera, country, choral music and mariachi. Mexican songs were a staple, sung by her entire family. She credits her mother for her love of Gilbert and Sullivan. Her father introduced her to traditional pop and the Great American Songbook. She would later help reintroduce that repertoire to a whole generation.

  Lola Beltrán and Édith Piaf shaped her singing early on. Ronstadt said their rhythms felt "more like Greek music... It's sort of like 6/8 time signature... very hard driving and very intense." Country singer Hank Williams was another influence. She has said that "all girl singers" eventually "have to curtsy to Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday."

  Maria Callas earned the highest praise of all. "There's no one in her league. That's it. Period," Ronstadt said. She added that Callas records taught her more about singing rock n roll than "a month of Sundays" of pop music. She admired Callas for her musicianship and for steering opera back toward its bel canto "natural style of singing." Ronstadt also calls herself a product of American radio in the 1950s and 1960s.

  In 2004, Christopher Loudon of Jazz Times wrote that Ronstadt was "blessed with arguably the most sterling set of pipes of her generation." Her natural range runs from contralto to soprano, and she sometimes shows the whole span within a single work. She co-composed only three songs in her long career. Rolling Stone argued that a whole generation, "but for her, might never have heard the work of artists such as Buddy Holly, Elvis Costello, and Chuck Berry."

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• 3. Folk Rock Beginnings

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  At age 14, Ronstadt formed a folk trio with her brother Peter and her sister Gretchen. They played coffeehouses, fraternity houses and other small rooms, billing themselves as the Union City Ramblers and the Three Ronstadts. They even recorded themselves at a Tucson studio as the New Union Ramblers. Their repertoire mixed folk, country, bluegrass and Mexican songs.

  In 1964, after one semester at the University of Arizona, the 18-year-old moved to Los Angeles. She wanted to join folk music with rock and roll. That Easter break she had visited a friend from Tucson, Bobby Kimmel, and they planned a band. Kimmel was already co-writing folk-rock songs with the guitarist Kenny Edwards. In the summer of 1966, Nik Venet signed the three of them to Capitol as the Stone Poneys.

  The Stone Poneys released three albums in 15 months in 1967-68. They were The Stone Poneys, Evergreen, Volume 2, and Linda Ronstadt, Stone Poneys and Friends, Vol. III. Their hit was Different Drum, written by Michael Nesmith before he joined the Monkees. It reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 12 in Cashbox. Nearly 50 years later, it remains one of her most popular recordings.

  Still bound to Capitol, Ronstadt released Hand Sown... Home Grown in 1969. It has been called the first alternative country record by a female recording artist. Around then she also sang on commercials. In one for Remington electric razors, a multitracked Ronstadt and Frank Zappa claimed that the razor "cleans you, thrills you... may even keep you from getting busted."

  Silk Purse arrived in March 1970 and was recorded entirely in Nashville. Ronstadt chose the producer, Elliot Mazer, on the advice of Janis Joplin, who had worked on the Cheap Thrills album. The cover showed Ronstadt standing in a muddy pigpen. She was not pleased with the record. Even so, it gave her first solo hit, Long Long Time, and her first Grammy nomination, for Best Contemporary Vocal Performance/Female.

  Through these lean years, Ronstadt toured with The Doors, Neil Young and Jackson Browne. One early backing band was Swampwater, a pioneering country-rock group that blended Cajun and swamp rock. Its members included the Cajun fiddler Gib Guilbeau. Swampwater backed her on The Johnny Cash Show, The Mike Douglas Show and at the Big Sur Folk Festival.

  In 1971, another backing band featured Don Henley, Glenn Frey, Bernie Leadon and Randy Meisner, who went on to form the Eagles. They toured with her briefly and played on her third album, Linda Ronstadt. That record produced a failed single, her version of Jackson Browne's Rock Me on the Water.

  Also in 1971, Ronstadt began working with the producer and boyfriend John Boylan. "As soon as I started working with John Boylan, I started co-producing myself," she said. That same year she began talking with David Geffen about leaving Capitol for his label, Asylum Records.

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• 4. Arena Class Star

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  Don't Cry Now, begun in 1973, had John Boylan and JD Souther producing most of its tracks. Ronstadt wanted a producer who would treat her as an equal. She asked Peter Asher, recommended by Kate Taylor, James Taylor's sister, to help with two tracks, Sail Away and I Believe in You. The album also held her first country hit, Silver Threads and Golden Needles, which reached the country Top 20. She had first recorded that song on Hand Sown... Home Grown.

  Asher hesitated at first because of her reputation as a "woman of strong opinions (who) knew what she wanted to do (with her career)." He agreed anyway and became her full-time producer through the late 1980s. He said the partnership lasted because he was the first person to manage and produce her without a romantic tie. "It must be a lot harder to have objective conversations about someone's career when it's someone you sleep with," he said.

  The music business later remembered 1975 as the year when 29-year-old Linda Ronstadt "belatedly happened." Heart Like a Wheel, named for a song by Anna McGarrigle, reached number 1 on the Billboard 200. It sold over two million copies in the United States and was the first of four number 1 country albums. Its first single, You're No Good, was a rockified version of an R&B song by Clint Ballard, Jr. She had resisted it at first because Andrew Gold's guitar parts sounded too much like a "Beatles song." It climbed to number 1 on both the Billboard and Cash Box pop singles charts.

  The second single, When Will I Be Loved, was an uptempo country-rock version of an Everly Brothers song. It hit number 1 in Cashbox, number 2 in Billboard, and became her first number 1 country hit. Her interpretations often outsold the originals, and new songwriters found larger audiences through her. She won her first Grammy, for Best Country Vocal Performance/Female, with I Can't Help It (If I'm Still in Love with You), a Hank Williams hit from the 1940s. The album itself was nominated for Album of the Year.

  Prisoner in Disguise followed in September 1975. It climbed into the Billboard album Top Five and sold over a million copies. Its first single, Love Is a Rose, was rising on the pop and country charts when Heat Wave, a rockified version of the 1963 Martha and the Vandellas hit, drew heavy airplay. Asylum pulled Love Is a Rose and reissued the single with Heat Wave as the main track. Heat Wave reached the Top Five on the Hot 100, and Love Is a Rose reached the Top Five on the country chart.

  In 1976, Hasten Down the Wind reached the Top 3 of the Billboard album chart. It was her third consecutive platinum album and won her second Grammy, for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. She wrote two of its songs, one of them Try Me Again with Andrew Gold. The album also held her version of Willie Nelson's Crazy, a Top 10 country hit in early 1977.

  At the end of 1977, Simple Dreams surpassed the success of Heart Like a Wheel. It spent nine consecutive weeks at number 2 behind Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, then displaced it and held number 1 on the Billboard 200 for five consecutive weeks. It sold over 3 million copies in less than a year in the United States, a record for a female artist. Its hits included Blue Bayou, a Roy Orbison song, and It's So Easy, which Buddy Holly had sung before. It also held Tumbling Dice by The Rolling Stones and Poor Poor Pitiful Me by Warren Zevon, then an up-and-coming songwriter.

  In late 1977, Ronstadt became the first female artist to have two songs in the Billboard Hot 100 Top Ten at once. Blue Bayou stood at number 3 and It's So Easy at number 5. The album's art director, Kosh, won a Grammy for Best Album Cover, the first of three he would win for her covers. Simple Dreams reached number 1 on the Australian and Canadian Pop and Country Albums charts, and she completed a concert tour around Europe. The Los Angeles Dodgers also asked her to sing the national anthem at game three of the World Series against the New York Yankees.

  In 1978, Living in the USA gave her a third number 1 album on the Billboard chart, equaling the record Carole King set in 1974. It was the first album by any act to ship double-platinum, with over 2 million advance copies. It eventually sold 3 million copies in the United States. Its single Ooo Baby Baby hit all four major singles charts: Pop, Adult Contemporary, Country and R&B. At year's end, Billboard named her Pop Female Singles Artist, Pop Female Album Artist and Female Artist of the Year overall. The cover showed her on roller skates with a short, permed haircut.

  Ronstadt also appeared in the 1978 film FM, in which disc jockeys try to broadcast her concert live. She sang Poor Poor Pitiful Me, Love Me Tender and Tumbling Dice in it. Mick Jagger had persuaded her to record Tumbling Dice, coming backstage to tell her, "You do too many ballads, you should do more rock and roll songs." On the 21st of July 1978, she joined the Rolling Stones onstage at the Tucson Community Center in her hometown, and she and Jagger sang that song together. "I'm scared to death all the way through my own shows," she said. "But it was too much fun to get scared."

  In 1978 alone, Ronstadt made over $12 million. Her albums were reported to sell 17 million copies that year, grossing over $60 million. She was the highest-paid woman in rock and the first woman to sell out arenas and stadiums holding tens of thousands of fans. Rolling Stone dubbed her "Rock's Venus." By 1979, she had collected eight gold, six platinum and four multi-platinum certifications, which was unprecedented at the time. Her 1976 Greatest Hits sold steadily for 25 years and was certified seven-times platinum in 2001. Over her career she has sold more than 100 million records worldwide.

  In 1979, she played arenas from Australia to Japan, including the Melbourne Cricket Ground and the Budokan in Tokyo. She also took part in a benefit concert at the Forum in Los Angeles for her friend Lowell George.

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• 5. Girl Singer Pressures

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  In a 1976 Rolling Stone interview with Cameron Crowe, Ronstadt described the road this way. "They haven't invented a word for that loneliness that everybody goes through on the road. The world is tearing by you, real fast, and all these people are looking at you.... People see me in my 'girl-singer' suit." In 1974 she told Peter Knobler of Crawdaddy, "People are always taking advantage of you; everybody that's interested in you has got an angle."

  In a 1969 interview with Fusion magazine, Ronstadt noted how hard it was to be a single "chick singer" with an all-male backup band. Few women worked the rock circuit then, and they were pushed toward "groupie level when in a crowd of a bunch of rock and roll guys." Ronstadt avoided that status. Treating men as fellow musicians led instead to competition, insecurity, bad romances and a series of boyfriend-managers. Musicians also hesitated to join her band, because they feared being labeled sidemen for a female singer.

  She admired singers like Maria Muldaur for not sacrificing their femininity. Ronstadt herself felt enormous self-imposed pressure to compete with "the boys" at every level. She said she was "artificially encouraged to kinda cop a really tough attitude" because rock and roll is a tough business.

  In 1976 and 1977, Ronstadt appeared on the covers of Rolling Stone and Time, and her image became as famous as her music. The Rolling Stone story came with photographs by Annie Leibovitz that showed her in a skimpy red slip. Ronstadt felt deceived, because she had not realized the pictures would be so revealing. Leibovitz refused to give her a veto over any photograph. One of them showed Ronstadt sprawled across a bed in her underpants. When Leibovitz came to show the pictures before publication, Peter Asher, then her manager, kicked her out of the house.

  In a 1977 interview, Ronstadt explained, "Annie saw that picture as an exposé of my personality. She was right. But I wouldn't choose to show a picture like that to anybody who didn't know me personally, because only friends could get the other sides of me in balance."

  The 1977 cover of Time ran under the banner "Torchy Rock," and it upset her too. She noted that the photographer kept making her wear a dress, an image she did not want to project. In 2004, she told CBS This Morning that the pose was not her because she did not sit like that.

  Asher defended her. "Anyone who's met Linda for 10 seconds will know that I couldn't possibly have been her Svengali. She's an extremely determined woman, in every area. To me, she was everything that feminism's about." He added that the qualities she showed were seen as negatives in a woman at that time, but as masterful and bold in a man.

  In 1978, Us Weekly reported that Ronstadt, Joni Mitchell, Stevie Nicks and Carly Simon had become "The Queens of Rock."

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• 6. Beyond Rock

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  Mad Love, released in February 1980, was Ronstadt's seventh consecutive platinum album. It was a straight rock and roll record with post-punk and new wave touches, including songs by Elvis Costello. It entered the Billboard album chart in the Top Five its first week, a record at the time, and climbed to number 3. It earned a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Vocal Performance/Female, which she lost to Pat Benatar's Crimes of Passion. Benatar said, "There are a lot of good female singers around. How could I be the best? Ronstadt is still alive!"

  In the summer of 1980, Joseph Papp cast Ronstadt as the lead in the New York Shakespeare Festival production of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance, alongside Kevin Kline. She said it was a natural choice. Her grandfather Fred Ronstadt was credited with creating Tucson's first orchestra, the Club Filarmonico Tucsonense, and had once arranged The Pirates of Penzance himself. After a limited engagement in Central Park, the show moved to Broadway. It ran there from the 8th of January 1981 to the 28th of November 1982.

  Newsweek praised her Mabel, noting that from her entrance trilling Poor Wand'ring One she was ready to scale whatever soprano peaks stood in her way. She received a Tony Award nomination for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical, and the production won several Tonys, including Best Revival. In 1983 she co-starred with Kline and Angela Lansbury in the film version. It was her only acting role in a motion picture, and it brought her a Golden Globe nomination.

  As a child, Ronstadt discovered the opera La bohème through the silent film with Lillian Gish. She resolved to play Mimi someday. When she met the opera star Beverly Sills, she was told, "My dear, every soprano in the world wants to play Mimi!" In 1984, Joseph Papp's Public Theater cast her in the role. The production was a critical and commercial disaster and closed after only a few nights.

  In 1981, Ronstadt recorded an album of pop standards, Keeping Out of Mischief, with the producer Jerry Wexler. She was unhappy with the result and scrapped it. "Doing that killed me," she told Time. Yet the music had seduced her, and she credited Wexler's encouragement. By 1983 she had enlisted the 62-year-old conductor Nelson Riddle. She still had to convince her reluctant record company, Elektra, to approve the idea. According to the jazz historian Peter Levinson, the Elektra president Joe Smith was terrified that a Riddle album would turn off her rock audience.

  What's New came out in September 1983 and spent 81 weeks on the Billboard album chart. It held the number three position for about a month and a half, kept from the top only by Michael Jackson's Thriller and Lionel Richie's Can't Slow Down. It was certified triple platinum. The cover showed Ronstadt in a vintage dress on satin sheets, wearing a Walkman headset, and cynics chided the project as "elevator music." Time called it "one of the gutsiest, most unorthodox and unexpected albums of the year."

  The album introduced Riddle to a younger audience, and Levinson says it brought his career back into focus in the last three years of his life. The trilogy continued with Lush Life in 1984 and For Sentimental Reasons in 1986. Together the three albums sold nearly seven million copies in the United States. In 1984, Ronstadt and Riddle performed the songs live in Australia, Japan and the United States, including multi-night runs at Carnegie Hall, Radio City Music Hall and Pine Knob.

  In the early 1980s, Ronstadt was criticized for accepting $500,000 to perform at the South African resort Sun City, breaking a cultural boycott against apartheid. She said, "the last place for a boycott is in the arts." Paul Simon was criticized for including her on Graceland, but he defended her. "She made a mistake," he said. "She's extremely liberal in her political thinking and unquestionably antiapartheid."

  Ronstadt eventually tired of playing arenas, where people milled around smoking marijuana and drinking beer. She no longer felt they were appropriate places for music. She wanted "angels in the architecture," a phrase from Simon's song You Can Call Me Al. She said she wanted to sing in places like the theatre of ancient Greece, where all attention is focused on the stage and the performer.

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• 7. Trio And Mexican Songs

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  In 1978, Ronstadt, Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris tried to record a Trio album, and the attempt fell apart. Ronstadt had already included a cover of Parton's I Will Always Love You on Prisoner in Disguise. She later remarked that not many people were in control at the time, and everyone was too busy with their own careers. A number of the recordings appeared on their solo albums over the next few years.

  In January 1986, the three finally entered the studio, and Trio came out in March 1987. It held the number 1 position on Billboard's Country Albums chart for five weeks and reached the Top 10 on the pop side. It sold over three million copies in the United States and won a Grammy for Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. It produced four Top Ten country singles, including the number 1 hit To Know Him Is to Love Him. It was nominated for Album of the Year alongside Michael Jackson, U2, Prince and Whitney Houston.

  A follow-up recorded in 1994 stalled in the same way. Ronstadt had already paid for studio time and owed her record company a finished album. At Parton's request she removed Parton's tracks, kept Harris's vocals and produced a number of the recordings herself. They appeared on her 1995 return to country rock, Feels Like Home. In 1999, the three agreed to release Trio II as originally recorded. It included a cover of Neil Young's After the Gold Rush, which became a popular music video and won a Grammy for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals.

  At the end of 1987, Ronstadt released Canciones de Mi Padre, an album of traditional Mexican folk songs that she called "world class songs." The mariachi musician Rubén Fuentes arranged it. She took the title from a booklet that the University of Arizona published in January 1946, written by her aunt Luisa Espinel. Espinel was an international singer in the 1920s and 1930s, and her father was Fred Ronstadt, Linda's grandfather. The songs she transcribed were ones he had brought with him from Sonora. Linda drew on favorites she had learned from her father Gilbert and offered the album as a tribute to him and his family.

  Ronstadt is not fully bilingual, but she sings Latin American songs with little discernible U.S. accent. She has often identified herself as Mexican-American. In 1976, she wrote the traditional ballad Lo siento mi vida with her father, and it appeared on Hasten Down the Wind. Eduardo "Lalo" Guerrero, called the father of Chicano music, was a frequent guest at the Ronstadt home and serenaded her as a child.

  Canciones de Mi Padre won a Grammy for Best Mexican-American Performance. In 2001 it was certified double-platinum for shipments of over 2 million copies in the United States. That made it the best-selling non-English-language album in American music history. Ronstadt also produced a theatrical stage show of the same name and took it to concert halls across the United States and Latin America, for Hispanic and non-Hispanic audiences alike. It included a limited Broadway engagement in 1988. PBS's Great Performances aired it, and it earned her a Primetime Emmy Award. In December 2020, the album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

  Mas Canciones, a follow-up released in 1991, won a Grammy for Best Mexican/Mexican-American Album. In 1992 she stepped outside mariachi to record Afro-Cuban songs on Frenesí, which won a Grammy for Best Traditional Tropical Latin Album. In 1991 she also played the archangel San Miguel in La Pastorela, a musical filmed at San Juan Bautista. Luis Valdez wrote and directed it for the PBS Great Performances series.

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• 8. Late Albums And Silence

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  In 1987, Somewhere Out There, a duet with James Ingram from the animated film An American Tail, peaked at number 2 on the Hot 100 in March. It won the Grammy for Song of the Year and earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song. It became a million-selling gold single, one of the last 45s ever to do so, and it reached number 8 in the UK. Steven Spielberg then asked her to record the theme for the sequel, An American Tail: Fievel Goes West. That song, Dreams to Dream, gave her an Adult Contemporary hit in 1991.

  Cry Like a Rainstorm, Howl Like the Wind arrived in 1989. It reached number 7 on the Billboard chart, her tenth Top 10 album, and was certified triple platinum. Aaron Neville joined her on several songs, alongside the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir, Tower of Power horns and the Skywalker Symphony. Don't Know Much hit number 2 on the Hot 100 at Christmas 1989 and also peaked at number 2 in the UK. All My Life reached number 11 on the Hot 100. The duo won the Best Pop Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal award in both 1989 and 1990.

  In 1990, Ronstadt made her last known live Grammy appearance, singing Don't Know Much with Neville on the telecast. "I can do things with Aaron that I can't do alone," she reflected in 2007. In December 1990 she also joined a Tokyo Dome concert for John Lennon's 50th birthday, alongside Miles Davis, Lenny Kravitz, Hall & Oates, Natalie Cole, Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon.

  The 1990s were quieter. Winter Light, released at the end of 1993 and featuring the glass harmonica, was her first commercial failure since 1972. It peaked at number 92, and Feels Like Home reached number 75 two years later. Both were later deleted from the Elektra/Asylum catalog. In 1996, Dedicated to the One I Love reinvented classic rock and roll songs as lullabies. It reached number 78 and won the Grammy for Best Musical Album for Children.

  We Ran, released in 1998 and produced by Glyn Johns, offered songs by Bruce Springsteen, Doc Pomus, Bob Dylan and John Hiatt. Critics liked it, but it charted no singles. At the time of its deletion in 2008 it had sold 57,897 copies, the poorest-selling studio album in her Elektra/Asylum catalog. In the summer of 1999, she released Western Wall: The Tucson Sessions with Emmylou Harris. It made the Top 10 of Billboard's Country Albums chart and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Folk Album. That New Year's Eve, she performed with the Eagles and Jackson Browne at Staples Center.

  In 2000, A Merry Little Christmas completed her contract with Elektra/Asylum. It included a duet with the late Rosemary Clooney on White Christmas. In 2006, recording as the ZoZo Sisters with the musician Ann Savoy, she made Adieu False Heart, a roots album released on Vanguard Records. It peaked at number 146 and was the last album she would record. Ronstadt had reduced her activity after 2000, when she felt her singing voice deteriorating. She toured for the final time in 2006 and headlined the Newport Folk Festival in August 2007. Her final live concert came in 2009.

  In 2011, Ronstadt told the Arizona Daily Star that she was retiring. In August 2013, she told Alanna Nash of AARP that she had Parkinson's disease and could "no longer sing a note." The diagnosis was later revised to progressive supranuclear palsy. Her most recent commercially available recording as lead vocalist is A La Orilla de un Palmar, on the Chieftains' 2010 album San Patricio. She published an autobiography, Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir, in September 2013. A documentary, Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice, followed in 2019, and a second memoir, Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands, appeared in 2022.

  Ronstadt released 24 studio albums and charted 38 singles on the Billboard Hot 100. Twenty-one reached the top 40, ten reached the top 10, and one reached number one. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on the 10th of April 2014, and on the 28th of July 2014 she received the National Medal of Arts and Humanities. In 2019 she shared a Hollywood Walk of Fame star with Parton and Harris as Trio, and she was one of five Kennedy Center honorees. She had won the Latin Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011 and the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016.

  On the 7th of May 2022, during the International Mariachi Conference, the Tucson Music Hall at the Tucson Convention Center was officially renamed The Linda Ronstadt Music Hall.

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