It’s where Linda’s great-grandfather Frederick, an immigrant from Hanover, Germany, settled in the 1850s, becoming a mining engineer and a colonel in the Mexican Army. His son Federico, Linda’s grandfather, was born on a Sonoran hacienda and brought his family to Tucson in 1882. Tucson is where Linda was born, in 1946, second daughter to Gilbert and Ruth Mary Ronstadt, sister to Peter, Suzy and Mike.

You may not have thought of Linda as a Mexican-American singer, but if you’ve heard her, you’ve heard her deep Sonoran roots. Hearing the ranchera singer Lola Beltrán for the first time can bring the shock of recognition to a Linda fan; there’s influence and long tradition behind that lustrous voice. Those old Mexican songs in Linda’s hit 1987 record “Canciones de Mi Padre” were ones she learned before she was 10.

Linda, who is 67, published a memoir this fall, “Simple Dreams,” which touches only briefly on her Arizona girlhood before moving on to her recording career. I knew about Linda the rock ’n’ roll sex bomb, who just made the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and I’d gotten to know her through her work in Arizona for civil rights and immigration changes. But after reading her book, I wanted to know more about little Linda the pony wrangler and devotee of Hopalong Cassidy, and the place she grew up in the 1940s and ’50s.

Image Credit... The New York Times

I emailed her this summer and asked if she was up for a memory trip. She was — she still has a house in Tucson, and many relatives and friends to see. (Other families have family trees, she told me. “We have a family anthill. Tucson is just swarming with Ronstadts.”) And she was eager to go back down into Sonora, a journey she’d made only a handful of times. We hatched a plan: We’d meet in November, when it’s cooler, see points of Ronstadt interest in Tucson, cross into Mexico at Naco, then head down the Rio Sonora valley to grandfather Federico’s hometown, Banámichi. She wanted to bring some old friends along as guides: Bill and Athena Steen and their son Kalin, who live in Canelo; and Dennis and Debbie Moroney, who raise cattle in Cochise County, near the border. Linda and Bill would meet me in Tucson, and we’d pick up the others on the way, for a truck-and-minivan caravan down memory lane.

The dusty, friendly little Tucson where Linda used to ride to the drugstore in a pony cart is mostly gone. Linda’s father once ran the F. Ronstadt Hardware Company, selling windmills and farm machinery to ranchers. The site is now the Ronstadt Transit Center downtown bus depot.

Some points of interest on the Ronstadt trail remain. There’s the Fox Tucson Theater downtown, where her father sang, billed as Gil Ronstadt and his Star-Spangled Megaphone. Singing is simply what Ronstadts do. Her father wooed her mother with mariachi tunes. Her grandparents cherished opera; her mother loved the American songbook and taught her children those comically bloody lullabies. Peter was an accomplished boy soprano. He, Suzy and Linda used to sing in local clubs as a folk trio, the New Union Ramblers.