By 1989, Don’t Know Much had already been recorded three times and had failed, three times, to become the hit its writers believed it was. It had been sung by its own composer, by a Righteous Brother, and — under a different title — by Bette Midler. What it was waiting for, though nobody could have known it, was the strangest pairing in mainstream pop: a country-rock soprano from Tucson and a New Orleans soul singer with the most delicate tenor in American music. When Linda Ronstadt and Aaron Neville finally sang it, the song went to number two, topped the adult contemporary chart for weeks, and won a Grammy. Some songs don’t need a better recording. They need the right two people in the room.
A Song Nobody Could Make a Hit
The song was written by a formidable team: Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, the husband-and-wife Brill Building partnership behind You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ and We Gotta Get Out of This Place, working with Tom Snow. Its premise is disarmingly humble — a singer admitting how little she understands about life, and holding up the one certainty she has: what she feels when she looks at the person she loves. In an era of power ballads built on grand declarations, it was a love song constructed out of modesty.
Mann recorded it first himself, on his self-titled 1980 album for Casablanca, and it went nowhere. Bill Medley, whose own voice had carried a Mann-Weil classic to immortality with the Righteous Brothers, tried it next: his 1981 single climbed to a modest number eighty-eight on the pop chart and number twenty-nine on the adult contemporary chart. Then Bette Midler recorded it as All I Need to Know for her 1983 album No Frills, and her single reached number seventy-seven pop and number thirty-nine adult contemporary. Three respected singers, three shrugs from the public. The song had everything except a reason to exist — the performance that would make its plainspoken lyric sound like the most romantic thing in the world.
Neville’s route to that studio was longer and stranger. He had scored a number-two national hit as long ago as 1966 with Tell It Like It Is, a record whose success he barely profited from, and had spent the intervening decades as a working musician — singing gospel with his brothers in the Hawketts’ tradition, funk with the Meters’ orbit through his brother Art, and harmony with the Neville Brothers, the family band that carried New Orleans music around the world without ever quite converting reverence into record sales. By 1989 he was forty-eight years old, a singer’s singer whose instrument — that quivering, feather-light tenor that seems to rise a half-step above the melody and hover there — was known intimately to musicians and only vaguely to the mass audience. What he lacked was never talent. It was a vehicle.
Meanwhile its eventual singers were moving toward each other. Ronstadt, after a decade of rock dominance, had spent the 1980s on what looked like detours: three lush albums of standards with arranger Nelson Riddle, a Spanish-language mariachi record, Canciones de Mi Padre, that became one of the best-selling non-English albums in American history. Neville, after the 1966 solo triumph of Tell It Like It Is, had settled into his role as the heart of the Neville Brothers, beloved in New Orleans and undervalued almost everywhere else. Neither one, on paper, was the other’s obvious partner.
Two Voices Meet in New Orleans
They had first met in 1984, at the World’s Fair in New Orleans, where Ronstadt was appearing with Nelson Riddle’s orchestra and Neville with the Neville Brothers. She had admired his singing for years — that fluttering, weightless tenor, equal parts gospel choirboy and street-corner soul singer — and the admiration was mutual. When, in 1989, she planned a return to pop with the album Cry Like a Rainstorm, Howl Like the Wind, Neville was her choice for a singing partner.
The song came to them through producer Steve Tyrell, who brought the duo a demo of Don’t Know Much; by all accounts they liked it immediately. Peter Asher, Ronstadt’s producer since the early seventies, built the record around the chemistry: a gleaming, unhurried ballad arrangement that gives each voice solo space before letting them intertwine, her crystalline directness answering his trembling falsetto like two halves of one thought. It was released under the billing “Linda Ronstadt featuring Aaron Neville,” and the pairing was the album’s centerpiece — but not its only fruit. Neville duets run through Cry Like a Rainstorm: four collaborations in all, including Karla Bonoff’s All My Life and a remake of Sam and Dave’s When Something Is Wrong with My Baby. Ronstadt had found not a guest star but a true counterpart — the rare singer whose vulnerability matched her own precision.
Listening to the record now, what astonishes is the balance. Duets usually resolve into a lead and an ornament; this one behaves like a conversation between equals who keep finishing each other’s emotional sentences. The lyric’s humility turns out to be the key: two of the most gifted vocalists in America, singing about how little they know, and meaning it. The song that three singers couldn’t sell became, in their hands, self-evident.
Number Two, Five Weeks on Top, a Grammy
Released in the autumn of 1989, Don’t Know Much climbed to number two on the Billboard Hot 100, where it stayed for two weeks — becoming Ronstadt’s tenth and final top-ten hit, thirteen years after her first — and it held number one on the Adult Contemporary chart for five weeks. The single was certified gold in the United States. Abroad it did even better, reaching number one in Canada and Ireland and number two in Britain and Australia. The album it fronted, Cry Like a Rainstorm, Howl Like the Wind, peaked at number seven on the Billboard 200 and was eventually certified triple platinum — a triumphant return to pop from a singer the industry had filed under “legacy act.”
At the Grammy Awards in February 1990, Ronstadt and Neville won Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal, and the song was nominated for Song of the Year — an honor that went, in one of pop’s rich ironies, to Wind Beneath My Wings, sung by Bette Midler: the same singer whose own version of this very song had stalled at number seventy-seven seven years earlier. Midler’s triumph and the duet’s were braided together, two halves of the same songwriting generation being honored on the same night.
Lightning, Twice
There is one more reason the record works, and it is written into the lyric itself. Don’t Know Much is a song about the limits of experience — about faces that show the years and lives that refuse to add up — and it asks to be sung by people who have actually accumulated some years to show. The earlier versions were beautifully sung, but they were sung by artists still near the start of their stories. Ronstadt was forty-three when she recorded it; Neville was forty-eight. Between them they carried more than fifty years of professional singing, commercial disappointments, vanished labels, and beloved-but-unprofitable bands. When those two voices agree that they don’t know much but know what they feel, the modesty is earned, and the audience of 1989 — much of it exactly their age, and exactly as uncertain — heard its own biography in the record. The song had not been waiting for better singers. It had been waiting for older ones.
The story has a postscript that borders on the implausible. The following year, Ronstadt and Neville returned to the Grammys with All My Life, another of their Cry Like a Rainstorm duets — and won the same award, Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal, for the second consecutive year. Two singers in their forties, in an industry increasingly organized around youth, had become the defining duet act of the moment by doing nothing more complicated than singing beautifully, together, about grown-up love.
For Neville, the door swung fully open: his solo career blossomed in the duet’s wake, and in 1991 he took a revival of Everybody Plays the Fool back into the top ten in his own right, a quarter-century after his first hit. For Ronstadt, Don’t Know Much stands as the last great pop moment of a recording career that would continue, characteristically, wherever her curiosity led — trio harmonies with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris, more Spanish-language records, jazz — before illness ended her singing and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted her in 2014. The duet catches both of them at the exact moment their long, winding apprenticeships paid off at once.
Don’t Know Much has since taken its place on lists of the greatest love-song duets ever recorded, and it remains the signature record of both singers’ later careers — for Neville, the hit that finally carried his voice to the full American audience it deserved; for Ronstadt, proof at the end of the eighties that her genius for finding songs had not dimmed. Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil, and Tom Snow had written the truth plainly enough in 1980: look at this face, I know the years are showing, look at this life, I still don’t know where it’s going. It just took nine years, three failed versions, a World’s Fair, and two of the most distinctive voices ever recorded to make the whole world believe it.