Ronstadt Sings Her Mexican Heritage in ‘Canciones’ : Album in Spanish Fulfills Singer’s Dream, Reveals Strong Family Tradition

Linda Ronstadt’s “Canciones de mi Padre” (Songs From My Father), her first album sung entirely in Spanish, is both a musical recognition of her Mexican roots and a personal reminder of childhood memories.

“My brother and I used to say that we could taste ashes in our food when we heard certain (Mexican) songs,” said Ronstadt. “There’s a certain kind of a huapango (a haunting malaguena-like song style from Eastern Mexico’s Huasteca region) sung as a trio, and it makes you taste ashes in your beans. I don’t know why.”

Like her three-album series of classic American pop ballads recorded several years earlier, “Canciones” was intended as an act of memory, in this case of the popular and traditional Mexican music she learned from her father, Gilbert, in her native Tucson.

“It was very important to me that this record sound like it was made before World War II,” she said of the period she considers the golden age of Mexican popular music. “The things that came later are very nice, but this is stuff that I was exposed to” through her father’s records, the songs he played on the piano and her family’s vacations in North Mexico.

“When I was 8 years old,” she recounted, “I would follow the (mariachis) around the town, standing outside the cantinas, because I loved it so much.”

But Ronstadt credits her father for the special way he introduced her to Lola Beltran and other legendary Mexican singers whom she still idolizes. “When (my father) would play these records, his whole spirit would come up,” Ronstadt recalled. “My dad was not cut out to be a business guy. He was a singer, a real artist.”

Indeed, a strong sense of family tradition runs throughout “Canciones.” The desert scene on the album’s back cover, for example, was painted by her father. Ronstadt also sings trios with her brothers Mike and Pete in such songs as “La Calandria” (The Lark), a traditional son or folk tune from Veracruz sung in a huapango style .

Ronstadt insists that “Canciones” does not represent a recent ethnic rediscovery, but a dream she has clung to since she started her career more than 20 years ago. The delay, she claims, was due to her need to explore other musical styles and the resistance of record producers disinterested or unfamiliar with Mexican music.

“They just didn’t understand it when I would elaborate on it,” she said. “I think they thought it was something to be discounted. Maybe they thought I should be ashamed of it.”

In 1974, after a frustrating decade in which she struggled to define herself as a folk- and country-rock singer, Ronstadt recorded “Heart Like a Wheel,” the first of four gold albums that thrust the singer into the nation’s rock mainstream. Soon afterward, Ronstadt formed her partnership with Peter Asher, the manager-producer who has since produced the singer’s biggest and most eclectic string of hits.

The singer’s desire to record an album of Mexican songs was rekindled in 1978 when Joan Baez recorded “Gracias a la Vida,” an album of Latin American folk songs. Asher discouraged the idea, citing poor sales of Baez’s album, Ronstadt said.

“Why not just do one or two songs,” Ronstadt remembers Asher suggesting. Ronstadt followed the advice, recording “Lo Siento, Mi Vida” in her then-fourth platinum album, “Hasten Down the Wind” in 1976. She followed with “Lago Azul,” a Spanish-language version of “Blue Bayou,” and a duet with Panamanian salsa star Ruben Blades.

But recording American pop in Spanish didn’t satisfy her. “I really wanted to do traditional (Mexican) 31songs,” she said, “but I knew that they really wouldn’t fit in the middle of a bunch of American pop songs.”

Hence “Canciones,” which doesn’t appear to hindered by language barriers. With 200,000 albums sold since its release Nov. 15, Elektra’s “Canciones de mi Padre” is well on its way to becoming the singer’s 15th gold album. Although Elektra has not performed a market study of “Canciones” record sales, company officials believe the album is selling well in both English- and Spanish-speaking markets.

Initial reviews also have been favorable.

Steven Loza, UCLA music professor who researched the album’s music, said that Ronstadt not only handles the various Mexican song styles well, “she compares with the best. In terms of quality, Linda is right there. It’s almost shocking to hear her.”

Loza isn’t the first to be surprised by Ronstadt’s irrepressible versatility. Only four years ago, the petite 41-year-old singer had evoked her patented image of the sexy ingenue when she posed atop a piano in an evening gown on the cover “What’s New,” an album of classic American pop ballads conducted and arranged by the late Nelson Riddle.

Ronstadt nevertheless maintains that “Canciones” represents the real singer, one who prefers to see herself as the product of a bicultural and bilingual border experience, in spite of the German, Dutch and English surnames that seem to dominate the Spanish ones in her family tree.

Actually, she said, the ethnic scales in her family tip more toward the Mexican side. Her great-grandfather, for example, not only married a Mexican woman, Margarita Redondo, when he settled in Banamichi, Sonora, but he fathered a generation of offspring who were raised as Mexicans, Ronstadt said.

The border, she added, never really uprooted or divided her large, multi-branched extended family, which still lives on both sides of the border. Even when her grandfather Federico moved in 1888 to set up a wagon-making business in Tucson, he was only an hour or so away from home, she said. Moving across the border, therefore, was hardly traumatic.

“We moved over a little bit, but (culturally) it was pretty much the same old thing,” she said. “It was a synthesis of culture as it had developed in the Southwest, and it was totally bicultural.”

In fact, it is the Sonoran desert and its people which Ronstadt most identifies with: “I was born in the Sonora desert, so it’s part of you. They just happened to put a border through the top of it. It’s still the same desert, the same cactus, the same people, and the same traditions.”

Still, Ronstadt rejects the notion that she dusted off her Mexican heritage to take advantage of the nation’s Latino market: “I’ve never made records with any consideration for what the market was. I have a track record, and I think it speaks for itself pretty loudly.”

She said her trail-blazing instincts have led her to stages as diverse as “The Pirates of Penzance” on Broadway and a singing role in Luis Valdez’s PBS October television production of “Corridos,” a series of musical vignettes based on Mexican story-songs.

Yet, ironically, “Canciones” might never have been made if it weren’t for an unexpected invitation three years ago to perform at a mariachi festival in her hometown. She said agreed to sing at a fund-raiser for Tucson’s La Frontera Mental Clinic in exchange for getting top mariachi groups to back her with music arranged by Ruben Fuentes.

Secretly, Ronstadt hoped that meeting Fuentes, Mexico’s foremost arranger-composer of mariachi and ranchera (country) music, would also develop into the kind of once-in-a-life collaboration she had concluded with Riddle in 1983.

Fuentes was initially wary. Ronstadt said she had selected the often difficult traditional standards from the 1940s and obscure ballads, such as “La Barca de Guaymas,” a mystical turn-of-the-century salon song her father played on the piano.

“ ‘Where did you find this stuff,’ ” Ronstadt remembers Fuentes asking her. “ ‘These old songs are very hard to sing.’ ” Then he made up his mind after hearing her sing. But even with the coaching of Fuentes and intensive Spanish-language studies in Mexico, she struggled to master the music and the Spanish, which she does not speak fluently.

“My mind knew it and my heart knew it, but did my tongue know it?” Ronstadt remembers asking herself. “I had felt (this music) since I was little. I just had to count on the right neurological connections forming themselves, and they did.”

The singer’s forays into Spanish promise to be more than just a brief romance.

Ronstadt hopes to take “Canciones” on a road tour that would be backed up by a troupe of folkloric dancers and Mexico’s finest and historic troubadours, Mariachi Vargas Tecalitlan, one of three top-notch groups which accompanied Ronstadt in her latest album.

She said she has also started work on “Voces” (Voices), a narrative, bilingual album being produced by jazz trombonist Barry Rodgers. Based on a musical footing of Afro-Cuban rhythms and American-styled ballads, the album hopes to tell the story of a Latina working woman’s spiritual strife in her new, materialistic homeland.

“She is going headfirst into this culture of materialism,” Ronstadt said of the album’s heroine. “She remembers the alma (soul) of what she left behind.”

But it’s still Mexican music, with its dominant Indian and Spanish strains, which Ronstadt prefers--a side of her which she believes explains the emotional exuberance of her singing.

“There are real traditions to adhere to” in this music, she concluded. “In American pop music, the only tradition is change. I like the kind of music that’s had to be refined over a couple hundred years. They get rid of a lot of the bad stuff and keep the good stuff.”