In late November 1987, one of the most successful singers in American pop music released an album that, by every commercial rule of the time, should not have worked. Linda Ronstadt was coming off a decade and a half of English-language hits, three albums of pop standards with Nelson Riddle’s orchestra, and, earlier that same year, a platinum country-harmony album with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris. Her next record was sung entirely in Spanish, backed by mariachi bands, and made up of traditional Mexican songs most of her pop audience had never heard. There was no English single to soften the landing, no crossover compromise, and no attempt to explain the songs to listeners who did not speak the language. It was called Canciones de Mi Padre — Songs of My Father — and it became, by the standard accounts, the best-selling non-English-language album in American recording history, a Grammy winner, and, decades later, an inductee into both the Grammy Hall of Fame and the Library of Congress National Recording Registry.
This article is about that decision, and about the childhood that made it inevitable. It is not a general biography of Ronstadt, and it is not a survey of her hits, although her standing in 1987 matters, because the album’s meaning depends on it. A struggling singer recording a heritage album is a curiosity. A star at her commercial peak recording one, in a language her own record company doubted would sell, is a statement. The statement was not made in a press release. It was made in the choice of repertoire itself: thirteen traditional songs, sung the way her family had sung them in Tucson, Arizona, with the finest mariachi musicians in the world behind her, and with her own brothers singing harmony. To understand why that mattered, it helps to start not in a Los Angeles studio in 1987, but in a house in the Arizona desert, forty years earlier, where a girl who did not speak much Spanish learned that Spanish was the language you sang in.
A caution belongs at the start, because this story is often told in shorthand that flattens it. The shorthand says her label forbade the album, or that she had never sung in Spanish before, or that the record was an instant, unqualified triumph in every market. None of those versions is quite right. The label’s resistance, as Ronstadt herself has described it, was doubt and disbelief rather than a single dramatic veto, and it was overcome by the leverage of a long, profitable career, not by a single confrontation. She had, in fact, recorded in Spanish before, though never a whole album. And the album’s success, while extraordinary for a Spanish-language record in the United States, was built slowly, through a tour whose promoters were nervous until the night of each show, rather than through a conventional pop launch. Where the sources disagree — on the album’s exact release day in November 1987, and on the precise wording of its Grammy category in different summaries — this article keeps its language general rather than choosing the tidier version. The shape of the story does not need false precision. It needs the childhood, the risk, and the result to be right, and they are consistent across the accounts.
Tucson: a house where Spanish was sung, not spoken
Linda Maria Ronstadt was born on 15 July 1946 in Tucson, Arizona, into a family whose roots ran on both sides of the Mexican border. Her father’s side was Mexican-German: her grandfather, Federico José María Ronstadt, had been born in Sonora, Mexico, and had come to Arizona, where, by the family’s account, he founded Tucson’s first orchestra in the 1890s, taught his neighbours to play their instruments, wrote arrangements and compositions, and ran a hardware business. Her father, Gilbert Ronstadt, carried on both sides of that inheritance: he worked in the family hardware store, and he played guitar and sang. The Ronstadt house in Tucson, on what was then a rural route outside the city, was, by Ronstadt’s own later telling, a house where music never stopped: her father whistling while he worked, her older brother practising for the Tucson Boys Choir, her sister singing along to the radio with her hands in the dishwater, and, after family parties, her father pulling out his guitar while cousins, uncles and aunts gathered around and sang.
That after-party singing is the image at the centre of this article, because Ronstadt herself has returned to it again and again. In a later Tucson newspaper interview, she recalled the pattern plainly: a big family party, her father and his guitar, cousins and uncles singing, aunts and uncles joining in, none of them singing professionally, all of them singing, as she put it, like talented amateurs expressing their emotions. The songs they sang were Mexican songs — rancheras, huapangos, and other traditional forms — learned from her grandfather, who had learned them from his father, and passed down again through her father. Ronstadt has said, in more than one interview, that she did not speak very good Spanish as a child, and that, to her young mind, Spanish was the language you sang in and English was the language you spoke. She would, in her own later phrase, chameleon along in harmony with her father, learning the melodies and the feeling before she fully understood the words. That distinction — a sung language learned by ear, in a family room, before it was ever a spoken language learned in school — explains a great deal about the 1987 album. Ronstadt did not approach these songs as a pop star researching an exotic repertoire. She approached them as a daughter returning to the sound of her own house.
Two other figures from that childhood world matter, because they gave the repertoire its shape. The first was her aunt, Luisa Espinel, her father’s sister, who had been an international singer and dancer in the 1920s, had travelled through Mexico and Spain collecting regional songs and dances, and had published, in 1946 — the year Linda was born — a booklet of songs and stories through the University of Arizona under the title Canciones de Mi Padre. The album’s title is that booklet’s title, borrowed back across four decades, and its printed material carried the same spirit: each song’s Spanish lyrics paired with an English translation and a note on the song’s background or its significance for Ronstadt. The second figure was Eduardo “Lalo” Guerrero, later called the father of Chicano music, a frequent guest at the Ronstadt home who, by the album’s history, would often serenade the young Linda with these songs. And a third influence, from outside the family, was the great Mexican ranchera singer Lola Beltrán, whom Ronstadt has credited as a model for her own singing style — proof that the childhood listening was not only domestic, but also shaped by the finest professional tradition of the music she would one day record.
Ronstadt left that house young. At seventeen she went to Los Angeles to start a musical career, first with the folk-rock trio the Stone Poneys, then as a solo singer. The Mexican songs stayed behind, not forgotten but shelved, because, as she later put it with characteristic bluntness, a young singer in America in the 1960s could not have got a record deal playing Mexican mariachi music. She built a career in English instead, and built it superbly. But the shelving was a postponement, not an abandonment, and the songs waited, in her memory, for the moment when she would have enough standing to record them without anyone’s permission.
The pop peak: a star with leverage to spend
By 1987, Ronstadt had standing to spare. Her breakthrough had come in the mid-1970s, when Heart Like a Wheel (1974) reached number one on the Billboard 200 and its lead single, a cover of “You’re No Good,” reached number one on the Hot 100, followed by a run of hit albums — Prisoner in Disguise, Hasten Down the Wind, Simple Dreams, Living in the USA — that made her, by the late 1970s, one of the best-selling and highest-earning touring artists in the world, and among the first women to headline arenas regularly. She had already shown a taste for left turns: in the early 1980s, when her rock audience might have expected another arena record, she recorded three consecutive albums of pop standards with Nelson Riddle’s orchestra, beginning with What’s New in 1983, and those, too, sold in the millions. And in March 1987, months before Canciones, she released Trio, the long-delayed harmony album with Parton and Harris that had been talked about since the mid-1970s, which went platinum and won a Grammy of its own.
That sequence matters, because it explains the leverage. Ronstadt did not walk into her label’s office in 1987 as a supplicant asking for a favour. She walked in as an artist who had delivered, over fourteen years, a catalogue of hits in rock, country and standards, and who could say, as she later recalled saying, that she had given the label enough records that sold that they had to take this one because she wanted to do it. Her own summary of the bargain is disarmingly plain: she did not think about whether the Spanish album would be commercial or not; it was just songs she liked, and, in her word, self-indulgence. In a later interview she put the point even more sharply, saying she had waited until she had enough clout to do it without their permission, and that they had to take what she gave them — and, as she added, they were happy to have it.
The label’s side of the story should be told fairly, because the popular version — a villainous company banning a heritage album — is not what Ronstadt herself has described. What she describes, in the documentary Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice and in later interviews, is disbelief rather than prohibition: a company responding, in her recollection, with something close to astonishment at the idea of recording archaic songs from the ranches of Mexico, all in Spanish. One later account of that meeting quotes the reaction as a single exclamation: record archaic ranch songs, all in Spanish — impossible. Ronstadt’s answer, by her own account, was to go to the label’s president, a man she describes as genuinely fond of music, and to frame the album as a personal record: she had made all those other records for the company, she said, and this one she was going to do just for herself, even if it sold only two copies, because if she could not record this music she felt she would die. That is not the language of a negotiation. It is the language of an artist telling a company that a debt of loyalty runs both ways, and that this record was the payment she was claiming. The company, to its credit, let her make it. The risk, as both sides understood, was real either way: for the label, a Spanish-language album from an English-language pop star; for Ronstadt, the possibility that the record she most wanted to make would be heard as a novelty, or not heard at all.
Making the record: three mariachi bands, and a family in the studio
The recording, made in 1987 at The Complex in Los Angeles, was produced by Peter Asher, Ronstadt’s longtime producer and manager, together with Rubén Fuentes, the legendary Mexican arranger and director of Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán. Fuentes served as musical director and bandleader, and the choice of musicians was deliberately uncompromising: the album is the only recording production, by its own history, to have used the three best mariachi bands in the world — Mariachi Vargas, Mariachi Los Camperos, and Mariachi Los Galleros de Pedro Rey — alongside a large cast of guitar, vihuela, guitarrón, trumpet, violin and harp players. That decision, to use not one good band but three great ones, tells a listener everything about Ronstadt’s ambition for the record. She was not making a pop album with a mariachi flavour. She was making a mariachi album, to the standard the tradition itself would recognise, and she was putting her voice — a voice trained in rock, country and standards — inside that tradition rather than asking the tradition to bend around her.
The track list, thirteen songs totalling just under forty minutes, reads like a family songbook made public. It opens with “Por Un Amor,” a ranchera of heartbreak that Ronstadt has since called a favourite, and moves through “Los Laureles,” “Hay Unos Ojos,” “La Cigarra,” “Tú Sólo Tú,” “Y Ándale,” “Rogaciano El Huapanguero,” “La Charreada,” “Dos Arbolitos,” “Corrido De Cananea,” “La Barca De Guaymas,” “La Calandria,” and “El Sol Que Tú Eres.” The songs span, by the album’s own framing, nearly a century of Mexican song, and they are not presented as museum pieces. They are presented as living repertoire, sung with the rhythmic drive and emotional directness that mariachi demands: trumpets answering violins, guitars driving the pulse, and a singer who must hold a long, exposed line over a full band without the shelter of a rock arrangement. Ronstadt’s brothers, Pete and Michael Ronstadt, sang harmony vocals on several tracks, with her sister-in-law Melinda Marie Ronstadt also contributing, so that the family singing of the Tucson parties was, in a literal sense, inside the studio. Her father’s painting appeared on the back cover. The record was, from its personnel to its packaging, a family document as much as a commercial release.
One detail of the sessions, reported in a later retrospective of the album’s production, captures the balance of authority inside the room. Fuentes, by that account, originally pushed for a more modern take on the music, and Ronstadt largely won out, insisting on the traditional sound she had grown up hearing. That detail is worth noting, because it prevents a simple story in which Ronstadt deferred to the Mexican musicians on everything, or imposed her will on them. The record was a collaboration, and like all good collaborations it involved argument about the right sound. What Ronstadt insisted on was not her own stardom but the tradition’s integrity: the songs as her father and grandfather had sung them, not as a contemporary producer might have updated them for a pop market. The result, to a listener who knows mariachi, sounds traditional without sounding stiff, and to a listener who does not, sounds like a great singer discovering, in middle age, the music she was born to.
A nuance that honest accounts preserve is that this was not, strictly, Ronstadt’s first Spanish-language recording. She had sung in Spanish before, including “Lo Siento mi Vida,” a song she co-wrote with her father for her 1976 album Hasten Down the Wind, and “Lago Azul,” a Spanish version of “Blue Bayou” released as a single after the English hit from Simple Dreams in 1977. Canciones de Mi Padre was her first album of Mexican traditional mariachi music, and her first album sung entirely in Spanish. That distinction matters, because it shows the 1987 record was not a sudden discovery of a language. It was the moment a singer who had been slipping Spanish songs into an English career for a decade finally gave the language, and the tradition behind it, a whole album of its own.
The result: a Grammy, a chart position, and a sales record
Canciones de Mi Padre was released in late November 1987 on Elektra/Asylum — sources differ on the exact day, giving 13 and 24 November in different listings, so this article dates it to late November rather than a single day — and its commercial story, while not a pop-chart blockbuster, was extraordinary for what it was. The album reached number 42 on the Billboard 200, a remarkable position for an album sung entirely in Spanish by an artist whose audience had been built in English, and it went on to be certified double-platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America, for more than two million copies sold in the United States, with United States sales reported at two and a half million and worldwide sales reported at nearly ten million as of 2012. Those figures are quoted here as reported in the album’s histories, not as a single audited total, because different summaries round them differently, but their direction is consistent: this was not a respectable niche success. It was, by the repeated description in its histories, the best-selling non-English-language album in American recording history, a record it held for more than thirty years.
The industry’s recognition followed the same pattern. At the 31st Grammy Awards, held in 1989, the album won the Grammy for Best Mexican/Mexican-American Album — the category’s name is given slightly differently in different summaries, as Best Mexican-American Performance in some, but the award and the year are consistent. Decades later, the record’s standing only grew: in 2021 it was announced that the album had been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, and in 2022 the Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the National Recording Registry, the national list of recordings deemed culturally, historically or aesthetically significant. A Spanish-language mariachi album, recorded by a pop star whose label had doubted it would sell, had entered the official American canon. That arc — from doubt to registry — is the album’s second story, and it is the one that makes the first story, the childhood in Tucson, feel complete rather than merely sentimental.
The tour: full theatres, and promoters who did not believe it until the doors opened
The album’s success was not only a matter of records sold. Ronstadt took the music on the road, in a staged mariachi show, and the tour’s story is as revealing as the album’s, because it tested, night by night, whether the record’s audience was real. Her longtime promoters, by her own later account, were nervous. They were the same promoters she had used for rock and roll, and they were used to an audience that bought tickets in advance. The mariachi audience, as Ronstadt explained it, did not work that way: Mexican-American audiences, in her phrase, do not buy tickets in advance; it is a walk-up business, with tickets bought at the door on the night. Night after night, the promoters watched advance sales that looked thin and worried the theatres would be empty. Night after night, by Ronstadt’s account, the company walked on stage and the theatres were full.
That walk-up pattern is a small detail with a large meaning. It meant the tour’s audience was not, in the main, Ronstadt’s existing pop audience dutifully following her into a new repertoire. It was, in large part, a new audience, or an audience that had been waiting, uncounted by the usual advance-sale machinery, for a singer of Ronstadt’s standing to sing their music on a big stage. The stage show itself, directed for the mariachi tour by Michael Smuin, presented the music as theatre — costumes, dancers, and a full mariachi band — rather than as a pop concert with a mariachi interlude, and a television special of the show carried the same presentation to viewers who could not get to a theatre. One Tucson performance, at Centennial Hall on 11 February 1988, with Mariachi Vargas, has become a touchstone in local retellings, because it brought the music home: the Tucson singer, singing her father’s songs, in her home city, with the band her father would have recognised as the finest in the world.
The tour also clarified, for Ronstadt, what the album had unlocked in her own career. She did not treat Canciones as a one-off detour before returning to English pop. She followed it with Mas Canciones in 1991, a second album of Mexican songs that won its own Grammy for Best Mexican/Mexican-American Album, and with Frenesí in 1992, an album of Afro-Cuban music, making the 1987 record the start of a second, heritage-focused phase of her career rather than a single experiment. That phase did not replace her English work — she returned to pop and rock albums afterwards — but it changed the shape of her catalogue, and of her reputation. A singer who had been filed, in the 1970s, as a California rock star, and, in the early 1980s, as a standards singer, was now also, permanently, a singer of Mexican music, with a Spanish-language catalogue that other artists and other audiences could build on.
Why one album still matters
It is easy, looking back, to treat Canciones de Mi Padre as a pleasant anomaly, a famous singer’s charming side project that happened to sell well. That reading sells the album short, and it sells its moment short, because it treats the record as a personal indulgence that got lucky, when it was, in fact, a deliberate use of commercial power on behalf of a culture that American pop had largely ignored. In 1987, Spanish-language music had almost no presence in the American pop mainstream, and a major-label album sung entirely in Spanish, by an artist of Ronstadt’s standing, was not a normal commercial proposition. It was a bet that an audience existed that the industry’s sales machinery could not see — an audience that bought tickets at the door rather than in advance, that heard its own family songs on the radio in Spanish, and that had never seen its music presented, with full production values, by a star of Ronstadt’s scale. The bet paid off, and its payoff is measured not only in platinum certifications but in the permission it gave afterwards: to other artists to record heritage music without apologising for it, and to Mexican-American listeners to hear their own tradition treated, in the mainstream, as world-class song rather than as a novelty.
Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano, writing on the album’s thirtieth anniversary, put the cultural point in terms Ronstadt herself might have recognised. Seeing Ronstadt sing in Spanish on national television, with her album cover published in newspapers, taught a generation of Mexican-Americans, in his account, that it was all right to be unapologetically Mexican, no matter how assimilated they might be. That is a large claim for a record to carry, and this article presents it as Arellano’s interpretation, not as a measured sociological finding. But it captures something the sales figures alone do not: the album’s audience did not only buy a record. They recognised, in a famous singer singing her father’s songs, a version of their own family story, told at a scale the mainstream had never allowed it before. Ronstadt herself, by her own account, had not thought about that impact while recording. She had thought about the songs, and about her father, and about whether she would ever get to sing them properly. The impact arrived afterwards, as such impacts usually do, unplanned and larger than the plan.
If there is a single image to carry away from this story, it is not a chart, and not a Grammy. It is a smaller, earlier image: a house in Tucson, after a family party, with a father and his guitar, and cousins and uncles and aunts singing songs they had learned from their own fathers, while a girl who did not yet speak the language well learned, by ear, how to harmonise with them. Forty years later, that girl, by then one of the most famous singers in America, stood on a stage with three of the finest mariachi bands in the world and sang those songs back, in the language she had first learned as music, to theatres full of people who had bought their tickets at the door. The distance between those two rooms — a family room in Tucson and a concert hall in 1988 — is the whole story of Canciones de Mi Padre. It is the story of a singer who waited until she had the power to record the music of her childhood, and who then used that power, not for another hit, but for the songs her father sang after the party was over.
What the album opened, and what it did not claim
A final distinction is worth making, because it keeps the album’s achievement honest. Canciones de Mi Padre did not invent Mexican music in America, and it did not single-handedly create a market for Spanish-language records. Mariachi, ranchera and huapango had long, rich traditions in the United States, sustained by Mexican and Mexican-American musicians, radio stations, and audiences who did not need a pop star to validate them. What Ronstadt’s album did was narrower and, in its way, more useful: it carried that tradition, intact and uncompromised, into rooms — record stores, theatres, Grammy ceremonies, and, eventually, the National Recording Registry — where it had rarely been presented at that scale, and it did so without translating it, updating it, or explaining it away. The album’s booklet, with its English translations and notes, was an invitation, not an apology: here are the songs, here is what they say, here is why they matter to the singer, and the music itself needs no further justification.
That modesty is the album’s lasting lesson, and it is why the record still rewards listening. Ronstadt did not present herself as a discoverer of Mexican music, and she did not present the album as a political statement. She presented it as a daughter’s record, made with the best musicians the tradition could offer, at the moment in her career when she could finally afford to make it. The fact that it sold millions, won a Grammy, entered two national canons, and filled theatres full of walk-up audiences is not a contradiction of that modesty. It is its reward: proof that a record made for the right reasons — for a father, for a family, for songs learned by ear in a house in Tucson — can find an audience far larger than the one its makers dared to expect, and can outlast the commercial doubts that greeted it. The label had asked, in effect, who would buy an album of archaic ranch songs, all in Spanish. The answer, given over the next thirty-five years, was: millions of people, in two languages, in theatres and in living rooms, and, finally, in the permanent collection of the nation whose pop charts had once had no room for it.
Sources
- Wikipedia — “Canciones de Mi Padre” (released late 1987; recorded 1987 at The Complex, Los Angeles; Elektra/Asylum; producers Peter Asher and Rubén Fuentes; first album of Mexican traditional mariachi music; RIAA double-platinum, 2,500,000 US certified units; Billboard 200 peak 42; Grammy Award for Best Mexican/Mexican-American Album at the 31st Grammy Awards; title refers to the 1946 University of Arizona booklet for aunt Luisa Espinel; Lola Beltrán influence; Eduardo “Lalo” Guerrero as a frequent guest who serenaded Ronstadt as a child; Rubén Fuentes as musical director/bandleader; Mariachi Vargas, Mariachi Los Camperos and Mariachi Los Galleros de Pedro Rey as the three best mariachi bands; earlier Spanish recordings “Lo Siento mi Vida” (1976) and “Lago Azul”; follow-ups Mas Canciones, Frenesí and Mi Jardin Azul; Grammy Hall of Fame induction announced 2021; Library of Congress National Recording Registry selection 2022; track listing and personnel, including Pete and Michael Ronstadt on harmony vocals and Gilbert Ronstadt’s back-cover painting).
- Wikipedia — “Linda Ronstadt” (born 15 July 1946, Tucson; Canciones de Mi Padre released at the end of 1987; Grammy Award for Best Mexican-American Performance; RIAA double-platinum certification in 2001 for shipments of over 2 million US copies; described as the best-selling non-English-language album in US music history).
- NPR Fresh Air — “Linda Ronstadt On Making Music: ‘I Knew How To Sing My Whole Life'” (2013 interview, revisited 2019; Tucson upbringing; Mexican songs learned from her Mexican grandfather and her father; grandfather’s Tucson orchestra and band; aunt Luisa Espinel as singer, dancer and music scholar who collected regional songs and dances in Mexico and Spain; title of Canciones de Mi Padre shared with her aunt’s collection).
- Arizona Daily Star via This Is Tucson — “Linda Ronstadt reflects on success, impact of ‘Canciones'” (2022; album inspired by her grandfather, founder of Tucson’s first orchestra in the 1890s; family parties with father Gilbert on guitar and relatives singing; three top mariachi bands; “Por Un Amor” as a favourite; label balked when she proposed a Spanish record; “I had given (the label) enough records that sold that they had to take this one because I wanted to do it”; 1989 tour, promoters nervous, walk-up ticket business, theatres full every night; Centennial Hall, Tucson, 11 February 1988 with Mariachi Vargas).
- Parade — “1987: Linda Ronstadt Risked Everything on What Execs Called a Fatal Career Mistake” (documentary account of Elektra’s disbelief; “Record archaic songs from the ranches of Mexico? And all in Spanish? Impossible!”; Ronstadt’s account of going to the label president, “I made all these records for you … I’m going to do this just for me”, “If it sells two copies, I don’t care. But if I can’t record this music, I’m going to die”; childhood Spanish learned by singing with her father, “Spanish was always a musical language”; Rubén Fuentes as musical director).
- Far Out Magazine — “The songs Linda Ronstadt wished she had recorded sooner” (Ronstadt on waiting until she had enough clout: “I waited until I had enough clout … until I could do it without their permission. And they had to take what I gave them … and they were happy to have it”; early-career view that she could not have got an American record deal playing Mexican mariachi music).
- Los Angeles Times — Gustavo Arellano, “Op-Ed: Linda Ronstadt’s ‘Canciones de mi Padre’ changed my life, and my culture” (21 November 2017, cited in the album’s references; thirtieth-anniversary reflection on the album as a watershed for Mexican Americans; seeing Ronstadt sing in Spanish on national television as teaching that it was all right to be unapologetically Mexican).
- San Francisco Classical Voice — “Linda Ronstadt Carries On” (marichi tour stage direction by Michael Smuin; Trio topping the country charts in 1987; Canciones de Mi Padre as the biggest-selling non-English American album; community testimony on the album’s importance).
- Wikipedia — “Heart Like a Wheel” and standard Ronstadt career histories (Heart Like a Wheel released November 1974, Billboard 200 number one, “You’re No Good” Billboard Hot 100 number one; run of 1970s hit albums; three Nelson Riddle standards albums from 1983; Trio with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris in 1987; Mas Canciones 1991 and Frenesí 1992 as follow-ups).
- Mobile Fidelity / Music Direct — “Linda Ronstadt: Canciones de Mi Padre” LP notes (first all-Spanish-language album following three pop-standards records; Fuentes originally pushing for a modern take, Ronstadt largely winning out on the traditional sound; double-platinum; Grammy; Grammy Hall of Fame).
- YouTube — “Linda Ronstadt – Tú, Solo Tú (You Only You)” (video page description as fetched: official album-art visualizer for “Tú, Solo Tú” from Canciones de Mi Padre, with links to Linda Ronstadt’s official channels; embed ID CMANQJq28yQ; channel name to be spot-checked on the public player at publish time).
Image credits: Urban street scene — photo by Lesli Whitecotton, Pexels free licence (thematic image only, not a photograph of Tucson or of Linda Ronstadt). Microphone on a dark stage — photo by Michael DO, Pexels free licence (thematic image only). Close-up of microphones in a studio — photo by Clement Lepetit, Pexels free licence (thematic image only). Illuminated control panel — photo by Daniel Ponomarev, Pexels free licence (thematic image only). River at dusk — photo by Ehsan Haque, Pexels free licence (thematic image only). All images are thematic illustrations; none is a photograph of Linda Ronstadt.