Film review: ‘Linda Ronstadt-The Sound of My Voice’

While in many ways a standard documentary portrait of a successful musician, “Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice,” is made more interesting by the singer’s refusal to stagnate on the money-printing path of pop superstardom.

For those raised on “The Simpsons,” Ms. Ronstadt is perhaps best remembered as the co-singer on Barney Gumble’s bilingual jingle “The Plow King,” but she was a legendary songstress well before then.

The documentary traces Ronstadt’s trip from childhood in southern Arizona to the Los Angeles folk scene in the 1960s. The set-up for her career cannot boast originality - we get a needle drop on the Mamas and The Papas’ “California Dreamin’” followed by Jackson Browne appearing to wax rhapsodic. It feels like we’re just hitting the next track button on a folk rock playlist until Ronstadt finds her voice with the Stone Poneys on “Different Drum” and then breaks off on her own.

Even as a touted solo performer cranking out Billboard chart toppers, Ronstadt chafed against the chauvinism of the music industry - no one in her backing band or management team could be a woman. While she preferred ballads, her unique voice was used to produce hits, some of which she candidly dismisses (“You’re No Good”).

One of the most interesting talking head insights comes from Cameron Crowe, who claims Ronstadt has authorship of the songs she sings even though she was not the original songwriter (because she retooled the tunes significantly from their original versions). Still, Ronstadt began to feel that playing the same ditties on arena tours made the music sound “like a washing machine.” She had a desire to craft perfect songs in different genres, which led to a career of stunning range.

In the 1980s alone, she tackled Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Pirates of Penzance,” an album of standards arranged by Nelson Riddle, a collaboration with Aaron Neville, and a country supergroup period with Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton. The documentary picks up when we see video recordings of the Trio in all their big-haired glory.

Most meaningfully, Ronstadt records a Spanish language record of songs she remembered singing with her Mexican-American father: “Canciones de Mi Padre” (the seed of the idea was inspired by the late-night crooning of her neighbor, Harry Dean Stanton!).

It seems a shame that, after her years of difficulty finding women in positions of power in the music industry, Ronstadt’s story is told by two male directors, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. Surely one of many great women doc directors could have been tapped.

It’s also unfortunate that, just as music runs in the family, so does Parkinson’s disease, from which Ronstadt now suffers. She can no longer do public shows and says poignantly, “I sing in my mind.” Happily, that does not prevent her from performing with her family in the living room, for the only audience she ever truly desired.