Missing You. The Loss of Linda Ronstadt’s Voice
In my mind, Linda Ronstadt was always the Queen of rock. She was reigned in the seventies and as the years passed she recreated herself: she was the singer of Mexican canciones, light opera, torch songs, forties love songs, big band, cartoon voices. She sang solo, she sang with others, she sang blues, jazz, songs for and from all ages. She took every song and made it hers, made it better.
I took it for granted that she’d always be around in some form. Life played a cruel trick on me; worst of all, the trick was on the songbird who will not be able to sing again.
Linda Ronstadt lost her voice to Parkinson’s. It was announced this past weekend. It was said that no matter how hard someone with Parkinson’s may try, they just can’t sing.
The author of this article states about my favorite album: “On ‘Simple Dreams,’ as elsewhere, Ronstadt took a range of genres and styles—often music written and sung by men—and made it her own, putting her voice into other artists’ loneliness, anger, tenderness, and wit.”
It’s a terrible thing that we will not be able to enjoy Linda Ronstadt’s voice in the future, but she gave us a magnificent past and should be celebrated.
The dancer slows her frantic pace
In pain and desperation,
Her aching limbs and downcast face
Aglow with perspiration
Stiff as wire, her lungs on fire,
With just the briefest pause
The flooding through her memory,
The echoes of old applause.
She limps across the floor
And closes her bedroom door…
The writer stares with glassy eyes
Defies the empty page
His beard is white, his face is lined
And streaked with tears of rage.
Thirty years ago, how the words would flow
With passion and precision,
But now his mind is dark and dulled
By sickness and indecision
And he stares out the kitchen door
Where the sun will rise no more…
Some are born to move the world
To live their fantasies
But most of us just dream about
The things we’d like to be
Sadder still to watch it die
Than never to have known it
For you, the blind who once could see
The bell tolls for thee…
“The bell tolls for thee…”
It all started with John Donne’s Meditation which became the poem For Whom The Bell Tolls
John Donne
Meditation 17
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions 1624
“No man is an iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee….”
…and eventually morphed into Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls, 1940 novel about the Spanish Civil War.
A phrase became classic and traveled through time, it was carried into pop culture through the years. And now is in another pop song. You have associated it with Linda Ronstadt. Going back to Donne, full circle: no man is an island, we are all interrelated and affected by each other.