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Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice

We know the ending — Linda Ronstadt is no longer really able to sing due to her Parkinson’s Disease — so watching this documentary’s clips of her superhuman vocals earlier in her career is an experience that’s at first thrilling and then shot through with melancholy. Seeing, at the film's end, Ronstadt ever-so-faintly harmonizing with her cousin and nephew is quietly devastating. Throughout “The Sound of My Voice,” filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman explore Ronstadt’s pioneering place as a woman in music — in rock and then in a variety of other genres, as she took on Gilbert & Sullivan, Mexican folk songs (she is of Mexican descent on her father’s side), and standards. We hear interviews with people who know her well and are renowned artists in their own right, from Don Henley to Emmylou Harris. “The Sound of Her Voice” will make you appreciate Ronstadt anew — and it will make you want to download her greatest hits immediately.