Simple Dreams ~ A Musical Memoir (27 page)

The final album I made before I retired from singing altogether was recorded in Louisiana with my friend Ann Savoy. The Savoys are a family of seemingly limitless talent and abilities and sit at the center of the Cajun music world. They live in Eunice, Louisiana, on a farm that has been in the Savoy family for seven generations. Ann’s husband, Marc Savoy, makes
the exquisitely handcrafted Acadian accordions prized by the masters of the Cajun accordion, of which Marc is one. He has been making these accordions since 1960, and when he lifts his large, handsome head to give the downbeat for a Cajun tune, he becomes one of the great gods of rhythm and joy. Marc can be prickly and moody, and Ann’s friends will tease her and tell her that she married the Cajun Heathcliff. He has a degree in chemical engineering but prefers to deal with wood. He might throw his head back and roar, “Let’s all get drunk and roll in the grass!” Then he will surprise you with a refined sensibility and gracious manner. I remember finding him in a rare moment when he wasn’t busy cleaning a chicken, making a batch of blood sausage, or crafting yet another beautiful accordion. I told him that Ann and I had seen the recent film version of
Pride & Prejudice
with Keira Knightly, and it had inspired me to read the Jane Austen book for the umpteenth time. “Oh,” he replied thoughtfully, “I just reread
Persuasion.
”

Ann is a true beauty, with alabaster skin, black hair, the palest dusting of freckles, and dark eyes that slope down at the outer corners. She has a classic Greek profile with a wink of Native American in her visage. Like her husband, she is an expert on the Cajun/Creole cultures of Louisiana. She executes a slamming rhythm on her big archtop guitar, and exhibits bionic stamina playing hour after hour for Cajun dances. Virginia-born, she studied art in Paris. Ann speaks Parisian French well but can also speak and sing like a Cajun. When she is not bent over a guitar, she’ll be sitting at her sewing machine, making a pretty dress to wear to the next dance or concert performance at folk festivals all over the world. The finished dress will be a design from the 1920s and look charming on her.

In addition to singing with the Savoy Family Cajun Band—composed of Ann, her husband, and their two sons—she records
and performs with a group of women called the Magnolia Sisters. They sing very old Cajun songs that Ann has collected. The songs are in French and are accompanied by guitars, fiddles, and accordion. The Magnolia Sisters have a haunting, plain sound, moody harmonies, and are most wonderful when they sing in unison with no instrumental accompaniment.

Ann and Marc have two gorgeous daughters who live in Paris. Sarah plays in a Cajun band, and Anna Gabrielle is a gifted visual artist. Their sons not only play in the Savoy family band but also belong to terrific bands of their own. These bands are comprised of the younger generation of Cajun/Creole musicians devoted to the tradition. Joel, a luthier who makes guitars, also produces and records in the studio he built on the Savoy farm. He plays Cajun fiddle and Gypsy jazz guitar. His younger brother, Wilson, plays blues-inflected honky-tonk piano and bawls Ray Charles classics in French. He is an enthralling performer. There is a constant stream of homemade music coming out of Ann’s kitchen, her living room, the yard where Marc is cooking something good over a fire, or the studio where the boys record.

When Ann and I met in 1989, we discovered that we had an uncanny number of things in common. We loved the same songs, as well as early-twentieth-century art, furniture, books, fabrics, and design. We even had the same teacups on our shelves. Marc and Ann’s life at their farm closely resembles the way that I grew up, with family music and food anchored in regional traditions always at the center of important activities.

My grandfather Fred Ronstadt’s careful instructions for building a wagon or buggy were found in his papers after he died: how to bend the wood, work the metal on a forge, the finishing details executed in fine woodwork. Also, there is a description of his experiences “on the road,” traveling with the
Club Filarmónico Tucsonense to Los Angeles to play concerts in the late 1890s. Marc’s meticulous notes describing how an Acadian accordion is assembled, what he had to learn to know how to make one, and exactly why it produces an instrument that plays better than one made by a machine are fascinating and very similar in tone to what my grandfather wrote more than a century ago.

Ann invited me to sing on
Evangeline Made
, a record she produced that featured contemporary artists singing traditional Cajun songs. She flew to Arizona, where I had moved to raise my two children, and we recorded together, with Ann coaching me on the French lyrics. Recording a project of our own was a natural outgrowth of our warm friendship. We’d both had careers screaming over loud bands, and wanted to do something quiet and contemplative. We wanted to sing about the passions of mature women: love and concern for our children, love between trusted and treasured friends, the precariousness of romantic love, the difference between the love you give to the living and the love you give to the dead, the bitterness of a lost love remembered, and the long, steady love you keep for good.

For our album,
Adieu False Heart
, much of which we recorded at the Savoy’s farm in Louisiana, Ann presented a great collection of song suggestions. We picked the ones that made us feel like we would die if we didn’t get to sing them. We listened to Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith’s uptempo version of “Adieu False Heart,” slowed it down, and changed it to a minor key and a modal scale. We resolved to record only traditional songs, and then sang “Walk Away Renee,” the pop hit we remembered from the sixties. Ann found “Marie Mouri,” a Cajun song based on a poem written by a slave in the eighteenth century, and “Parlezmoi d’amour,” a song of heartbreaking sentiment that had been popular in Paris between the two world wars. We hung out in
our pajamas and rehearsed the harmonies, shared stories about our lives and children, and drank pots of black tea and Marc’s incredibly strong coffee. When we finished rehearsing or recording for the day, we would sit outside in front of a fire that Marc fed with logs the size of boulders, and stare through the trees at the moon or the lowering Louisiana sky.

Someone once asked me why people sing. I answered that they sing for many of the same reasons the birds sing. They sing for a mate, to claim their territory, or simply to give voice to the delight of being alive in the midst of a beautiful day. Perhaps more than the birds do, humans hold a grudge. They sing to complain of how grievously they have been wronged, and how to avoid it in the future. They sing to help themselves execute a job of work. They sing so the subsequent generations won’t forget what the current generation endured, or dreamed, or delighted in.

The essential elements of singing are voice, musicianship, and story. It is the rare artist who has all three in abundance.

Because of the wonder of YouTube, I was able to reconnect to the singing of Pastora Pavón, the voice I heard rising from the 78 rpm recordings owned by my father when I was three. Known as La Niña de los Peines, or the girl with the combs, she is viewed, in the long lens of history, to be among the greatest flamenco singers Spain has ever produced. It was a thrill to hear that voice again after some sixty years, and interesting to examine the elements of a great voice that was able to affect me so strongly as a small child
and
as an experienced singer later in life. What is it that makes her singing inimitable, searing, and able to leap cultural and language barriers while she addresses the most essential yearnings and expectations of humankind? What is it that she shares with her other European singing sisters,
Yanka Rupkina of Bulgaria, Amália Rodrigues of Portugal, Edith Piaf of France, singers who can make me feel like they have grabbed me by the throat and told me, urgently, that I
must
listen to something they have to tell me, even when it’s in a language I don’t understand? I don’t know the answer.

I sang my last concert on November 7, 2009, at the Brady Memorial Auditorium in San Antonio. I was performing with my beloved Mariachi Los Camperos, and a wonderful folkloric dance troupe, Ballet Folklorico Paso del Norte. My old roommate Adam Mitchell, an enthusiastic fan of the Camperos, was in the audience. After the show, we went back to my hotel to laugh and reminisce about our Malibu days and how carefree they seemed compared to our mature lives, with children and responsibilities that we could only vaguely imagine in our precipitous youth. Adam felt that of all the bands I had toured with, some were as good as, but none surpassed, the Camperos. He also felt, in the times that he had heard me perform with a still-healthy voice, he had never seen me as happy or relaxed in any performances as I was while singing the Mexican shows. I agreed.

Epilogue

I
LIVE THESE DAYS
with my two children, and am watching them navigate the wonderful and strange passage from teenager to young adult. They both play instruments, have a lively and active interest in music, and use it to process their feelings in a private setting. This is the fundamental value of music, and I feel sorry for a culture that depends too much on delegating its musical expression to professionals. It is fine to have heroes, but we should do our own singing first, even if it is never heard beyond the shower curtain.

My father died at home in 1995, with all four of his children at his bedside. In the forty-eight hours before he died, he recited a twenty-verse limerick from memory, sang us a beautiful Mexican song, “Collar de Perlas,” and read us funny passages from the book he was reading, Gabriel García Márquez’s
Love in the Time of Cholera
. At some point he put down the book and devoted his entire attention to the strange work of dying. He faced it with great courage. It changed the way I feel about death. While I don’t exactly embrace it, I no longer fear it in the same way.

In Tucson, my sister, brothers, and cousins assemble on the third Sunday of every month to eat great food and sing the old family songs. My cousins John and Bill Ronstadt play regularly in musical establishments in Tucson. My brother Michael tours the United States, Mexico, Canada, and the British Isles with his group Ronstadt Generations, performing original material and traditional songs of the Southwest. In addition to my brother, the group includes his two sons, Mikey, who sings and plays the cello, and Petie, who sings and plays bass and guitar. My beautiful cousin Britt Ronstadt sings in several rock bands in Tucson,
and there is always a line around the block to hear her when she is performing. At nineteen, my niece Mindy Ronstadt, another local Tucson performer, recorded a duet with me in Spanish, “Y Ándale,” that was a hit in Mexico. My sister’s son, Quico, writes songs and performs. My cousin Bobby George and his wife, Susie, sing in a vocal group with my old Stone Poneys bandmate Bobby Kimmel, who moved back to Tucson. My two brothers and my sister, plus cousins Bill and John, have sung backup on several of my recordings, and I could always rely on their genes to supply the family vocal blend.

People ask me why my career consisted of such rampant eclecticism, and why I didn’t simply stick to one type of music. The answer is that when I admire something tremendously, it is difficult not to try to emulate it. Some of the attempts were successful, others not. The only rule I imposed on myself, consciously or unconsciously, was to not try singing something that I hadn’t heard in the family living room before the age of ten. If I hadn’t heard it by then, I couldn’t attempt it with even a shred of authenticity.

At the time, struggling with so many different kinds of music seemed like a complicated fantasy, but from the vantage point of my sixty-seven years, I see it was only a simple dream.