On his way to becoming a Rock & Roll Hall of Famer, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winner and the subject of an upcoming biopic which will star Selena Gomez, Linda Ronstadt has packed theaters around the world. But her favorite sits on a one-way side street in Tucson, Ariz.
With a courtyard draped in vines and string lights and a main stage the size of a ‘good little opera house’, 1927 Temple of Music and Art it’s “just magic,” Ms. Ronstadt said. Before its start progressive supranuclear palsy — a Parkinson’s-like disorder that ended her singing career in 2009 — could fill the room with her unamplified voice (a little surprising to anyone who’s ever heard her belt outBlue Bayou” the “Big Time,” For the legions who may have just discovered her on “The last of us“). She also loves a theater front: a stage-framing arch that immediately focuses the eye — “like this fireplace,” she explained, gesturing toward a wall near the couch where we chatted in her cozy San Francisco living room.
At 77, Ms. Ronstadt now lives in the Bay Area, near her children but on the border of the Sonoran Desert where she was born and raised. it will always be home. And despite the changes he sees when he returns every six months or so, many familiar local delights remain, for starters: hot cheese fries at El Minuto Cafefrozen shrimp cocktail at Congress Hotelgiant saguaros at every turn and live entertainment of all kinds at the Fox Tucson Theaterwhere her father — a businessman with a famous baritone — performed as Gil Ronstadt and His Star-Spangled Megaphone.
The Ronstadts have been part of the Tucson music scene ever since her grandfather arrived from Mexico in 1882 and helped find it Club Filarmónico Tucsonense urban band. And perhaps no place showcases the family’s heritage like the former Tucson Music Hall, which has been rechristened Linda Ronstadt Music Hall in May 2022. The naming ceremony took place during a spectacular mariachi performance that featured Jesús “Chuy” Guzmán, who had recorded with Ms. Ronstadt on 1987’s “Canciones de Mi Padre” — which is still the best-selling non-English album in U.S. history. This grown-up ode to frontier classics has been remastered and re-released last fall, and there’s perhaps no better soundtrack to explore her city.
Here are five of her favorite places to visit in Tucson:
1. Barrio bread
Her first stop is a relative newcomer: a 15-year-old girl artisanal bread company that earned its owner, Don Guerra, the James Beard Award for Outstanding Baker in 2022. “I always go there straight from the airport,” said Ms. Ronstadt, who used to bake her own bread (the loaf pictured on the back of the “It feels like homeThe album is one of her creations). She loves the heritage grains Mr. Guerra uses (Sonoran white wheat, for one), and especially in her order: the sesame Cubano, which is so flavorful, she prefers it unadorned.
“It’s my favorite hotel in the world,” said Ms. Ronstadt in 1930 Landmark of the Spanish Colonial Revival where he stays when he’s in town. The place is rich in family history — both her own (she’s been attending parties there since she was a girl) and the owners. Isabella Greenway, Arizona’s first congresswoman and Eleanor Roosevelt’s maid of honor, opened the inn’s doors four generations ago. Traditions aside, Ms. Ronstadt loves the native landscape, the piano-equipped Audubon Bar & Patio, and the fireplace and sunlight that illuminate her beloved guest house.
Planted on the site of an ancient indigenous settlement, this ode to more than 4,000 years of local agriculture is many types of gardens in one — some born from the region, others introduced through immigration. Native grains such as corn, beans, and squash grow in the O’odham, Yoeme and Hohokam plots, while citrus fruits scent the Spanish colonial orchards, jujube graces the Chinese garden, and leafy greens thrive in Africa in the fields of the Americas (to name a few of the hundreds of crops on site). Docents are generous with samples of anything that looks ripe during the tours, but there are also special tastings and food events in the calendar. “I love going there to get a bite of fresh,” Ms. Ronstadt said. Tip: If the garden-made orange marmalade is in stock, buy some.
4. The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum
In the 1950s, when her father was a founding member and her mother was one of the original professors, the Desert Museum, as locals call it, was “a little roadside attraction,” Ms. Ronstadt said. “I was going to see George L. Mountainlion,” the former a series of adopted mountain lions; to live there. The place has since evolved into a famous zoo, botanic garden, aquarium, gallery and natural history museum, but it still feels refreshingly untamed. “You’re not looking at the perfect geometry imposed on the desert,” he observed of the animals’ habitats. “Nature hates perfect geometry.”
5. Mission San Xavier del Bac
Completed in 1797 (although restoration is ongoing), this national historic landmark on Tohono O’odham land is Arizona’s oldest intact European structure—and it’s still an active church. “I’m an atheist, but I baptized my children there,” Ms. Ronstadt said, referring to the magic she feels behind the mission’s white walls. In the kaleidoscopic interior — all elaborate sculpture, frescoes and trompe l’oeil — candles have been lit with Ray Kundersearched for in the middle of recording rest with Emmylou Harris and adjusted the patron saint’s blanket “to make sure they’re comfortable.” Atheist or not, she finds something sacred there. To borrow from her recently released Latin choral classic Christmas album: Life is full of “mystery.”