Linda Maria Ronstadt is a retired American singer who performed and recorded in diverse genres including rock, country, light opera, the Great American Songbook, and Latin. She has earned 11 Grammy Awards, three American Music Awards, two Academy of Country Music awards, an Emmy Award, and an ALMA Award. Many of her albums have been certified gold, platinum, or multiplatinum in the United States and internationally.
Linda Ronstadt parents: Meet Gilbert Ronstadt, Ruth Mary Copeman Ronstadt
Linda Maria Ronstadt was born in Tucson, Arizona, on July 15, 1946, to Gilbert Ronstadt (1911–1995), a prosperous machinery merchant who ran the F. Ronstadt Co., and Ruth Mary (née Copeman) Ronstadt (1914–1982), a homemaker.
Ronstadt was raised on the family’s 10-acre (4 ha) ranch with her siblings Peter (who served as Tucson’s Chief of Police for ten years, 1981–1991), Michael, and Gretchen. The family was featured in Family Circle magazine in 1953
Ronstadt’s father came from a pioneering Arizona ranching family and was of Mexican descent with a German male ancestor. The family’s influence on and contributions to Arizona’s history, including wagon making, commerce, pharmacies, and music, are documented in the library of the University of Arizona.
Her great-grandfather, the engineer Friedrich August Ronstadt (who went by Federico Augusto Ronstadt), immigrated first to Sonora, Mexico, and later to the Southwest (then a part of Mexico) in the 1840s from Hanover, Germany. He married a Mexican citizen and eventually settled in Tucson.
In 1991, the City of Tucson opened its central transit terminal on March 16 and dedicated it to Linda’s grandfather, Federico José María Ronstadt, a local pioneer businessman; he was a wagon maker whose early contribution to the city’s mobility included six mule-drawn streetcars delivered in 1903–04.
Ronstadt’s mother Ruth Mary, of German, English, and Dutch ancestry, was raised in Flint, Michigan. Ruth Mary’s father, Lloyd Groff Copeman, a prolific inventor and holder of nearly 700 patents, invented an early form of the electric toaster, many refrigerator devices, the grease gun, the first electric stove, and an early form of the microwave oven. His flexible rubber ice cube tray earned him millions of dollars in royalties
