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What singer lost her voice?

Linda Ronstadt lost her ability to sing nearly a decade ago, and now her vision and hearing are going too. But the Grammy-winning singer, best known for songs like “You're No Good” and “Blue Bayou,” has not let her growing list of ailments slow her down.

datebook.sfchronicle.com - Linda Ronstadt lost her voice but found her purpose with new book ...

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Linda Ronstadt lost her ability to sing nearly a decade ago, and now her vision and hearing are going too. But the Grammy-winning singer, best known for songs like “You’re No Good” and “Blue Bayou,” has not let her growing list of ailments slow her down. Over the past few years, she went on tour with a live retrospective conversation, produced a documentary film and picked up a Kennedy Center Honor.

Now Ronstadt, 76, has written a book.

The initial idea for “Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands,” published by Berkeley’s Heyday Books on Tuesday, Oct. 4, was to share some family recipes from her early years living between Tucson and the Rio Sonora region of northern Mexico. But it quickly evolved into something with a higher purpose. “I don’t cook, so I suppose I didn’t have anything particularly earth-shattering to contribute,” Ronstadt, speaking by phone from her home in San Francisco’s Sea Cliff neighborhood, told The Chronicle about how the project evolved. “But I wanted to write about my great-grandmother and I didn’t know anything about her from my grandmother. So it just became complicated.” Ronstadt collaborated with former New York Times journalist Lawrence Downes and photographer Bill Steen to finish the book. Jerry Brown, the former governor of California with whom Ronstadt was in a relationship for many years, in a statement described the book as “personal and revealing,” pointing to its photographs, family letters and family recipes. “This is quintessentially an American story — touching, and well worth reading,” he said. The granddaughter of a Mexican immigrant, Ronstadt has drawn attention to her heritage throughout her career, most prominently with a run of albums devoted to traditional mariachi music released from 1987 to 2004, with the first, “Canciones de Mi Padresome (My Father’s Songs),” inspired by her father. Those albums became some of the best-selling non-English albums in the U.S. “Feels Like Home” expands on the theme of her musical memoir, “Simple Dreams,” which was published in 2013. Along with the personal stories that Ronstadt has never before told in full about her ancestors and her childhood in the 1950s and ’60s, she also draws attention to the border politics that have affected the lives of so many immigrants and refugees. She derides the former president, who she refuses to mention by name, for “criminalizing Mexicans” and labeling them “rapists and murderers.” “The desert was beautiful until they put tons of razor wire on it to make it look like Beirut,” Ronstadt said, “and there was no reason to do it.” The idea for the book came up in 2013, Downes said, and took shape through a series of conversations he had with Ronstadt over the years, many on road trips they took together through the desert. He recorded and she talked.

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“We talked about the food. We talked about the music, We talked about her family,” Downes said by phone from his home in New York. “Between the two of us, I wrote the manuscript in rough form, and then she went through it page-by-page with this painstaking attention to detail she is famous for.” He said that the writing process allowed him to see Ronstadt in a new light. “What was most amazing was fleshing out this picture of someone you think you know. She’s been so famous for so long,” Downes added. “Then you realize you don’t know the first thing about the culture in and around Tuscon and how deeply connected she is to it. The roots go way deep.” Ronstadt said she took the Arizona desert “for granted my whole life growing up,” but her perspective changed once she moved to San Francisco. “I love the feeling of being out on a road trip and driving through the big sky,” Ronstadt said. Those trips have grown rarer since she announced she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2012. One of the most celebrated female vocalists of her generation, the Grammy-, Emmy-, Golden Globe- and Tony Award-winning artist has had to find new creative outlets since losing her singing voice to the degenerative brain disease. Those include her retrospective 2018 live show, “A Conversation With Linda,” where she recollected her career interspersed with snippets of recordings and videos, and the award-winning 2020 documentary “Linda and the Mockingbirds,” about her 2019 trip to Mexico with Jackson Browne and the students of Los Cenzontles Cultural Arts Academy in Richmond. Ronstadt did make a special outing recently to see Browne at Steve Earle’s all-star benefit concert for Hugh “Wavy Gravy” Romney’s Camp Winnarainbow at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco on Sept. 29, where she also spent time backstage with contemporaries such as Emmylou Harris and Elvis Costello. “I mostly stay home because when I go out it requires wheelchairs and I have to wear clothes and all kinds of things,” Ronstadt said, her voice now a near whisper. “But it was a really great lineup — except I couldn’t hear a word that anybody sang or said, and I can’t see so I couldn’t see who was on the stage. I met Elvis Costello and didn’t recognize his face. I was really embarrassed.”

Ronstadt’s last concert appearance was a mariachi show in 2009 in San Antonio. Does she miss the stage?

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“No, I never liked performing,” Ronstadt said. “I like to sing in the living room with friends and family. That’s my favorite thing to do. Aside from that, I love to record. But that’s over.”

By Linda Ronstadt and Lawrence Downes

(Heyday Books; 248 pages; $35)

Albondigas de la Familia Ronstadt (Ronstadt Family Meatballs)

My mom had a beautiful relationship with her in-laws. That she was neither Mexican nor Catholic was never a problem. She won them over. She told me she would sit down to a conversation about calculus with my grandfather, who also had an amazing mind, and he’d leave her behind in three sentences. Mom learned to cook Mexican food from my grandmother, who was a really good cook. My grandmother made this dish most days for my grandfather when he came home from the hardware store for a hot lunch. I loved having it for dinner at my grandparents’ house. My grandmother set an elegant table, and these delicate albondigas, made fragrant with mint and cilantro, were often the soup course.

* Makes about 65 meatballs, or 6 to 8 servings.

Ingredients

3 pounds ground beef, preferably flank and round steak

6 medium-sized tomatoes, preferably plum

½ cup fresh mint, finely chopped

½ cup cilantro, minced

1 small garlic clove, minced

1 medium scallion, minced

2 tablespoons oregano

Salt and pepper to taste

¾ cup olive oil or melted lard

6 cups boiling water

Lime wedges for serving

Directions

Put the ground beef in a large bowl.

Broil the fresh tomatoes just until the skin can be removed easily. Peel the tomatoes and remove the seeds. Purée in a blender. There should be about 1½ cups. Add the mint, cilantro, garlic, onion, oregano, salt, and pepper to the meat. Mix well. Add the tomatoes and knead the mixture. Add the oil or melted lard, incorporating it into meat mixture by kneading. The mass should be neither dry nor too liquid. Test the mixture by forming a piece into a ball the size of a walnut. It should hold together. Proceed to form walnut-sized balls, and then drop a few at a time into boiling water. Cook for 5 to 8 minutes. Serve the meatballs in the liquid in which they were cooked, with lime wedges on the side.

datebook.sfchronicle.com - Linda Ronstadt lost her voice but found her purpose with new book ...

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