She was once the highest-paid woman in rock, selling millions of albums in English.
Then, Linda Ronstadt walked away from the sound that made her famous to sing entirely in Spanish instead. Her label feared it would end her career.
Instead, it became the best-selling non-English album in American history.
Tucson, Arizona, 1964. An 18-year-old named Linda Ronstadt boards a bus for Los Angeles with nothing but a suitcase and a voice.
Linda Ronstadt, April 1980
Within two years, she joins a folk trio called the Stone Poneys. Their single, Different Drum, climbs to number 13 on the Billboard charts in 1967.
She goes solo in 1969 and spends the early 1970s building a reputation as a serious force in the emerging country-rock scene centered around Los Angeles.
By 1974, her album Heart Like a Wheel tops the charts and wins a Grammy. Ronstadt becomes the first woman in music history to score three consecutive platinum albums.
She eventually stretches that streak to eight consecutive platinum records, a run few artists of any gender ever match.
Her 1978 album Living in the USA becomes the first record by any artist in American history to ship double platinum before release.
That same year, her combined earnings reportedly reach 72 million dollars, making her the highest-paid woman in rock, worth roughly 264 million dollars in today's money.
Here is what most people miss: at the absolute peak of her English-language stardom, Ronstadt decided to risk it all on a language most of her fans didn't speak.
Her father used to sing her Mexican folk songs as a child in Tucson, music passed down from her aunt, an international singer named Luisa Espinel.
In 1987, Ronstadt announces she wants to record an entire album of traditional Mexican mariachi music, sung completely in Spanish.
Her record label is reportedly skeptical. Ronstadt herself isn't even fluent in Spanish and has to work intensively on her pronunciation before setting foot in the studio.
A chance meeting helped change the label's mind. Her father introduced her to mariachi legend Mariachi Vargas and singer Lola Beltran at a Tucson mariachi conference, and their invitation to perform together the following year proved the audience was real.
She enlists three of the greatest mariachi bands alive, Mariachi Vargas, Mariachi Los Camperos, and Mariachi Sol de Mexico, along with legendary Mexican arranger Ruben Fuentes.
The album, Canciones de Mi Padre, meaning Songs of My Father, releases in late 1987 to widespread industry doubt about its commercial potential.
It becomes an immediate sensation. The record goes double platinum in the United States and eventually sells close to 10 million copies worldwide.
To this day, it remains the best-selling non-English-language album in American recording history, a record still unbroken decades later.
Ronstadt later described walking onstage to perform with a mariachi band for the first time and seeing three generations of one audience together, grandparents down to grandchildren, all shouting the traditional gritos at exactly the right moments.
She would go on to release several more Spanish-language albums, helping pull Mexican mariachi music into the American mainstream during an era when few crossover artists dared attempt it.
In 2021, decades after its release, Canciones de Mi Padre was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, a formal recognition of just how enduring the gamble turned out to be.
Across her career, Ronstadt earns 11 Grammy Awards, an Emmy, two Academy of Country Music Awards, and eventually a spot in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014.
By 2000, though, something is changing. Ronstadt begins struggling with her voice onstage, describing the sensation as her throat simply clamping shut mid-performance.
She performs her final concert in November 2009, still unsure exactly what is happening to the instrument that had defined her entire life.
She had spent nearly a decade before that, since around 2000, quietly struggling to control a voice that would freeze mid-note, sometimes forcing her to yell through performances rather than sing them.
In December 2012, a neurologist delivers news that stuns her completely: she has Parkinson's disease. Her diagnosis is later refined to a related condition called progressive supranuclear palsy.
She can no longer sing a single note. Here is the universal lesson inside Ronstadt's story: the same willingness to risk everything on a mariachi album at the height of her fame carried into how she faced losing her voice entirely.
Asked years later whether she feared death, Ronstadt answered simply that she wasn't afraid of dying, only of suffering, and that she planned to keep living regardless of what came next.
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