🛣️ A Drifter’s Anthem: Finding Home on the Road with Linda Ronstadt’s Enduring Spirit
There are certain songs that, when they drift across the airwaves, immediately transport you back in time, evoking the smell of the open road and the yearning for a place to call your own. One of the most evocative of these is “Willin’,” a true anthem of the American highway, masterfully interpreted by the incomparable Linda Ronstadt. The version in question, “Willin’ (Live at Television Center Studios, Hollywood, CA, 4/24/1980),” captures the raw, enduring power of this track during a period where Ronstadt reigned supreme as the queen of rock and country-rock crossover.
The live performance featured here was part of a special, full-length concert recorded for an HBO television broadcast. While the performance itself from April 24, 1980, didn’t immediately chart as a single, the captured moment became a crucial part of the Live in Hollywood album, which was eventually released decades later in 2019, finally giving fans the complete, digitally remastered show. This album, which includes this stirring take on “Willin’,” hit a high note by reaching Number 1 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart in 2019, a testament to the enduring love for Ronstadt’s work and the timeless quality of the performance.
The heart of “Willin’,” however, lies not with Ronstadt, but with the late, great Lowell George, the visionary behind the band Little Feat. George wrote the song while a member of Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, though its drug references—the famous line about “weed, whites, and wine”—supposedly led to his departure from Zappa’s notoriously straight-edged band. It was initially included on Little Feat’s 1971 debut album and later re-recorded for their classic 1972 album, Sailin’ Shoes. The song’s meaning is a poignant piece of Americana, a soulful ballad told from the perspective of a weary, hard-living truck driver traversing the vast, lonely expanse of the American Southwest—from “Tucson to Tucumcari, Tehachapi to Tonopah.” This driver is “warped by the rain, driven by the snow” and is “still willin'” to keep moving, willing to smuggle “smokes and folks from Mexico” for the right price, all for the fleeting vision of his beloved “Dallas Alice” in every passing headlight. It’s a rugged, romanticized portrait of a life spent on the move, chasing freedom and a paycheck, no matter the cost or the occasional brush with the law.
When Linda Ronstadt adopted “Willin'” for her 1974 breakthrough album, Heart Like a Wheel, she transformed it. She was, as she put it, an interpreter, not a writer, but her gift was an uncanny ability to inhabit the soul of a song. As a female voice singing what was essentially a truck-driving man’s anthem, she brought a profound layer of vulnerability and shared experience. Ronstadt often reflected that she related to the life on the road, traveling on buses and stopping at truck stops, living a life of constant motion like the narrator. Her soaring, yet grounded vocals lent the gritty poetry a new, almost gospel-tinged earnestness, securing its place as a classic Ronstadt cover.
Listening to this 1980 live version is like opening a memory box. The instrumentation is impeccable, featuring a band of all-stars like Bill Payne from Little Feat on keyboards and Danny Kortchmar on guitar, providing the perfect blend of country-rock twang and smooth California polish. Ronstadt’s voice, clear and powerful, cuts through the decades, connecting us instantly to the restless spirit of the late 70s and early 80s—a time when her voice was the definitive sound of a genre-blending era. It reminds us that no matter how hard the journey, or how far we’ve drifted, we are still, in the deepest sense, “willin’.”
Oldies Songs