Linda Ronstadt
Album: Hand Sown… Home Grown/Silk Purse/Linda Ronstadt
Label: BGO
Tracks: 31
Website: http://www.bgo-records.com

It was in the final year of the 60s when the diminutive "drop-dead gorgeous" vocalist broke from the ranks of The Stone Poneys (in which she sang with Bob Kimmel and Kenny Edwards) when the band split in 1968, to make shortly afterwards the first of what would become a trio of solo records for Capitol, Hand Sown… Home Grown.

This LP contained ten songs by the cream of contemporary writers, not necessarily well-known and not necessarily within the ambit of pure country although loosely in the folk-country vein. Best of these were the compositions by Steve Gillette & Tom Campbell, John D. Loudermilk and Chip Taylor (the disc's producer), and two by Bob Dylan. Linda turns in a sensuous swinging version of I'll Be Your Baby Tonight, while the other number, Baby You've Been On My Mind, had been recorded in 1964 but not officially released at the time. (Maddeningly, no performer credits were given for the supporting musicians, but the BGO booklet note has managed to unearth at least some of these salient details.) Silk Purse (did it really sport that photo of Linda posed on a barn floor in front of a pig ?!), was a similarly wide-ranging collection of songs, if not really as absorbing for this listener (dare I say it sounds a bit of a pig's breakfast?…). Additionally, I find the arrangements in the main rather overblown, with liberal use of backing vocal choir and a more mainstream-sounding ensemble - except for the more adventurous strings-and-harpsichord setting of Long Long Time which sounds well.

Most satisfying otherwise are the more stripped-down opus Louise (by Paul Siebel),which features Gary White on duet vocal, and the shapeshifting Mel Tillis number Mental Revenge. Perhaps the closest to "proper country" here was the gospel-style finale, Life Is Like A Mountain Railway. For the final album of this collection, Linda's producer was John Boylan, who hired Glenn Frey, Don Henley, Randy Meisner and Bernie Leadon, a nascent Eagles (in all but name), as her backing group, augmenting these musicians with a host of others (including steel guitar ace Sneaky Pete Kleinow, guitarist Herb Pedersen and fiddler Gib Guibeau) as necessary. One curious thing about this album is that on no one track do all four "Eagles" play together; another is that three of the tracks have audience applause tacked on after (I'm not convinced).

Thus, despite the high standards of musicianship on call, the result is slightly uneven, knitted together only by the force of Linda's relaxed and confident vocal personality. It could be said that not many country singers could credibly tackle such an assortment of material, ranging from Johnny Cash's I Still Miss Someone and Patsy Cline's I Fall To Pieces through to Neil Young's Birds, Jackson Browne's Rock Me On The Water, Eric Andersen's Faithful and Fontella Bass's chart hit Rescue Me. And it all hangs together surprisingly well today, as I was interested to discover on hearing the LP here for the first time in over 30 years.

This fine BGO reissue, in collecting all three of these LPs together under one roof, allows for a truthful perspective on her achievement in those early years as a solo artist, and comes complete with a lengthy (if at times perhaps a little too discursive and tangential) booklet essay by John Tobler.

David Kidman