The most original singer Linda Ronstadt ever heard: "A great musician"
Being a great singer wasn't always about making the greatest vocal leaps for Linda Ronstadt.
She based singing more on the person who was behind everything, and if she could believe every single line that she was singing, she knew that she had a great song on her hands most of the time. But even if there was a lot more interesting music out there than laying her signature brand of country rock, she was willing to go to bat for singers that didn't necessarily have the greatest vocal timbre for most people.
Let's face it: rock and roll isn't the kind of genre that lends itself to bands that have the greatest voices. Little Richard showed everyone the power of what someone could do when they screamed, but at the same time, there were always more than a few people who were able to squeak by having a limited vocal range. Frank Zappa and Lou Reed weren't giving off the same energy that Pavarotti was, but that didn't really matter because Pavarotti couldn't have sung a song like 'Heroin' if he tried.
Some of the greatest songwriters in the world are the ones writing tunes that only they could deliver, and even when looking at Ronstadt's track record, there were a handful of artists that she wasn't going to be able to touch. She knew that Frank Sinatra perfected pretty much every song he sang before anyone else had the chance to cover it, and even when someone like Randy Newman was writing his fair share of classics, Ronstadt couldn't see herself singing with the same gravitas that he had.
But the real dividing line in rock and roll comes down to one question: Is Bob Dylan a good singer? I mean, he's not technically gifted in the traditional sense, and any standard vocal coach would have complained that his nasal whine would have been improper form if he were trying to sing opera or something like that, but when you look at the kind of track record that she's had, there aren't too many songs that he couldn't annihilate if he had the right sound for it.
He was going for maximum impact every time he wrote some of his political material, but even when he started writing romantic tunes, he was the kind of person who could level someone in only a few lines. 'Tangled Up in Blue' didn't have to be the most accessible song in the world, but you can definitely see a picture of this guy who has thrown away the love of his life and is doing everything he can to get her back.
So while Ronstadt was truly gifted with her voice, she felt that Dylan had a natural voice that no one else could properly touch, saying, "Bob Dylan, forget it, he's a great singer. He's got a wonderful resonance. He's a fine musician. You don't get that voice without being a great musician. He's a completely original-sounding singer, and that's hard to do. You have to give him his due."
That also had a lot to do with where rock and roll was at the time. The singer-songwriter genre had become one of the biggest movements in the world, and while Dylan wasn't the kind to play pretty songs in the vein of James Taylor, he was definitely making people think in a much different way whenever he made his tunes, like when he genuinely questioned what the importance of war was like when he made tunes like 'Masters of War'.
This was someone who wasn't taking the conventional route to becoming one of the greatest singers of all time. Anyone could have kept working on their voice until they sounded perfect, but Dylan wanted to shake people and make them question the world they were living in, and almost every rock and roller was willing to go along for the ride across every one of his records.
