Linda Ronstadt – Western Wall: The Tucson Sessions

Building the Arizona Inn in Tucson kept Isabella Greenway busy for a while after she left Congress. She filled it with furniture bought from an organization she founded to provide work for disabled war veterans. Although she had hundreds of staff in several states, she personally attended to resolving issues arising from its racial diversity. This, mind you, was in the mid-1930s.

Even were Linda Ronstadt not a Tucson native, a cottage at the Arizona Inn would have made a perfect production studio for this joint effort with Emmylou Harris. Like Greenway, the women were trailblazers, carving success from a musical hybrid that has since endured more than 20 years. And like that of the Arizona Inn, Western Wall is stuccoed thick with womanly strength, compassion and grace.

The genre these divas call home is built on songwriting that captures emotion in imagery like spiderwebs in amber. Western Wall is loaded with sublime examples, including two of Harris’ own. “Raise The Dead” borrows biblical references to evoke saints of American music (Hank Williams, Robert Johnson, Sam Cooke, Bill Monroe). “All I Left Behind” inventories the pieces of a shattered heart in trinkets misplaced on “the lost highway.”

Another Harris song, “Sweet Spot”, co-written with Luscious Jackson’s Jill Cunniff, is among several that depict women as sources of strength and succor. Leonard Cohen’s grateful “Sisters Of Mercy” neatly parallels the hauntingly lovely, entirely sympathetic monologue of a whore in David Olney’s “1917”. Kate & Anna McGarrigle contribute harmonies and a blessing sung in Latin for the woman’s kindnesses. Sinead O’Connor’s “This Is To Mother You” delivers movingly on its promise from the wellspring of the instinct.

The strangely beautiful and invasive character of the West is inescapable on this record — notwithstanding Patti Scialfa’s “Valerie”, resurrected from her only release, 1993’s Rumble Doll, with its factories stunningly captured “like fire breathing dragons” from whose “throats a scarlet river burns.” Elsewhere, the songs are strewn with references to Mexico and open skies; the instrumentation consistently haunts, surprises, threatens and breaks like a desert storm. Ronstadt’s voice transits from burnt adobe alto to gleaming copper mezzo, a contrast and complement to Harris’ fluid, feathered soprano.

Yet the title track, by Rosanne Cash, refers not to the artists’ home region, but to a desert locale half a world away. The Western Wall is that of the second temple in Jerusalem, the holiest site in Judaism. Cash casts God as a woman, but two kings are also represented within the album’s songwriting credits: “For a Dancer” by Jackson Browne, and “Across The Border” by Mr. Scialfa, Bruce Springsteen.