Linda Ronstadt Called This ‘The Eagles’ Member The Love Of Her Life
Summary She was the queen of 1970s rock, a woman whose name was linked to governors, filmmakers, and future Hollywood legends.
Linda Ronstadt dated a sitting California governor. She got engaged to the man who created Star Wars.
She turned down marriage again and again, on her own terms, every single time. But when she looked back on her life decades later, none of those famous names were the one she called the love of her life.
That title belonged to a songwriter most people have never heard of — a man whose peanut butter sandwich started a romance that would accidentally help create one of the biggest bands in rock history.
Their love story didn’t end in marriage. It didn’t even end in heartbreak, exactly. It ended somewhere far more complicated — and far more enduring.
For the full article, please check the comments below. Article Long before she was crowned the Queen of Rock, Linda Ronstadt was a girl on a ranch outside Tucson, Arizona, growing up in a house where music was never confined to a single genre.
Mexican folk songs drifted through the same rooms as country standards and American pop, and by the time she was a teenager performing with her siblings in a makeshift family group, she’d already absorbed a musical range most singers spend a lifetime chasing.
That refusal to be boxed into one sound would define her entire career. Born in 1946 to Gilbert Ronstadt, a machinery businessman, and his wife Ruth, Linda left the University of Arizona after a short stint and moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1960s, right as the city’s music scene was reinventing itself.
She formed the folk-rock trio the Stone Ponies with Bobby Kimmel and Kenny Edwards, scored a hit, and quickly outgrew the group.
Her 1969 solo debut, Hand Sown… Home Grown, is now considered one of the earliest alternative country records made by a woman, though real commercial breakthrough was still years away.
That breakthrough arrived in the mid-1970s in a rush. Heart Like a Wheel, Prisoner in Disguise, and 1977’s Simple Dreams turned her into one of the biggest recording artists on the planet — over 100 million records sold, sold-out arenas, a Grammy, magazine covers, the title of highest-paid woman in rock.
She’d built her career not primarily as a songwriter but as an interpreter, someone who could take another writer’s song and make it unmistakably hers.
With that fame came relentless tabloid fascination with her personal life. She dated, at various points, producer John Boland, musician JD Souther, filmmaker and actor Albert Brooks, a young Steve Martin (who later joked about how intimidated he’d been by her), Bill Murray, and an up-and-coming Jim Carrey, who remembered her fondly for years afterward.
Her romance with California Governor Jerry Brown became one of the most photographed relationships of the decade — an unlikely pairing of rock star and rising political figure that lasted years and had many expecting a wedding.
It ended, reportedly, over Brown’s concern that marrying a famous entertainer would complicate his political future.
Not long after, she began a quieter, more private relationship with Star Wars creator George Lucas.
They dated for years and became engaged, but the engagement dissolved without public explanation, and neither ever detailed what went wrong.
Ronstadt was candid, later in life, about why marriage never stuck. She didn’t believe a wedding ring was necessary for a meaningful life, and she knew herself well enough to admit she wasn’t built for constant compromise — joking once that if she wanted a pink sofa and someone else didn’t, the pink sofa was always going to win.
She did become a mother, adopting daughter Mary in 1990 and later son Carlos, and she deliberately shielded her children from the spotlight; her daughter, she once revealed, didn’t even realize her mother sang in English until around age six, having mostly heard her sing in Spanish at home.
Fame carried a darker undercurrent Ronstadt rarely discussed publicly in her early years. In 1969, during a trip to Nashville for an appearance on The Johnny Cash Show, a producer talked his way into her hotel room under the pretense of discussing the performance, then undressed and assumed she’d welcome his advances, allegedly warning her that no one would believe an accusation given how she looked.
She escaped to the lobby. It wasn’t an isolated incident — she later described enduring aggressive behavior from Jim Morrison while touring with the Doors and weeks of mistreatment from a member of Neil Young’s band.
She kept performing anyway, later channeling that independence into a career defined by artistic risk-taking — musical theater, American standards, and a return to the Mexican music of her childhood, regardless of commercial expectations.
In 2004, she publicly praised Michael Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 from the stage of a Las Vegas casino, triggering a furious backlash that got her banned from the venue — a controversy she accepted without regret, true to a career built on choosing principle over popularity.
But of every name linked to her over five decades, one relationship stood apart in her own recollection: her romance with songwriter JD Souther.
They met before either of them was famous. Souther, already a gifted young songwriter, jokingly asked Ronstadt to cook him dinner; she handed him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich instead.
It was enough. He fell for her almost instantly and was asking her to move in with him within a day.
What followed became one of the most quietly influential partnerships in 1970s music. Souther wrote songs Ronstadt would go on to record, produced one of her albums, and became a trusted collaborator during the most important years of her career.
His biggest contribution, though, may not have been a song at all — it was a band.
In the early 1970s, Ronstadt was assembling musicians for her touring group. She saw a young band called Shiloh play at LA’s famed Troubadour club and immediately hired their drummer, Don Henley.
Needing a guitarist soon after, she brought in Glenn Frey, who happened to be performing alongside none other than JD Souther at the time.
With bassist Randy Meisner and guitarist Bernie Leadon rounding out the lineup, Ronstadt had unknowingly assembled the four future founding members of the Eagles.
Touring together, sharing hotel rooms and stages night after night, Henley and Frey discovered how well they worked together — and by the tour’s end, had decided to strike out on their own.
Ronstadt always rejected the idea that she “created” the Eagles, crediting the band’s success entirely to their own talent.
But there’s little dispute that without her, and without her relationship with Souther drawing those particular musicians into her orbit, the band might never have formed in quite the same way.
Even after the Eagles launched their own career, the threads never fully separated. Band members kept contributing to Ronstadt’s records; Souther remained one of her closest musical collaborators for years.
And though the romance between Ronstadt and Souther eventually ended, their mutual respect never did — they continued working together and supporting each other’s careers long after they’d stopped being a couple.
Decades later, reflecting on the long list of famous men who’d passed through her life — the governor, the director, the actors, the comedians — Ronstadt’s mind kept returning to Souther.
He remained, in her own words, the standard against which every subsequent relationship seemed to be measured.
When JD Souther died in 2024, it closed a remarkable chapter of American music history.
He’d helped shape the sound of country rock, played a quiet but pivotal role in the formation of the Eagles, and left his imprint across some of Ronstadt’s greatest recordings.
But above all of that, he was the man she came to describe, quietly and without qualification, as the love of her life — a bond built not on a wedding that never happened, but on friendship, creative partnership, and a connection that outlasted the romance itself.
