April 29, 2025
Ann Hampton Callaway returns to Arizona to pay musical tribute to one of the state’s brightest
singing voices at Symphony Hall in Phoenix
Ann Hampton Callaway’s singing has quite literally taken her around the world. The Tony Award-nominee has sung for U.S. Presidents, and her compositions have been recorded and performed by some of the biggest names in the business, from Barbra Streisand to Carole King.
But for her, there’s nothing quite like returning home to Arizona, much less performing in her adopted home state and also paying tribute to a legendary Arizona songstress.
The classically trained pop jazz singer-songwriter will get to do all three when “Ann Hampton Callaway: The Linda Ronstadt Songbook” comes to The Phoenix Symphony stage in May. Three performances will draw from the Tucson native’s iconic songs including “Blue Bayou” and “Someone to Watch Over Me” to hits like “You’re No Good” and “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me” to classics “What’s New” and “Am I Blue.”
Callaway, however, gets to interpret the selections to honor the woman behind the voice.
“She really just basically did the kind of music that she wanted to do and most of it came from her childhood,” Callaway said of Ronstadt. “Nobody wanted her to do a standards record. Nobody wanted her to do a Mexican album. Nobody wanted her to be doing opera. She just obeyed her own instincts.”
The Ronstadt family’s Arizona ties are much celebrated, particularly in southern Arizona. A music hall in Tucson is named in Linda’s honor, streets are named after family members, and six different Ronstadt family ensembles perform music to this day with old songs from Sonora, Mexico, as part of the family heritage through the generations.
Linda, an 11-time Grammy winner and legendary figure in country, rock and roll, and Latin music, achieved critical and commercial success in the 1970s. She announced her retirement in 2011, disclosing later that she could no longer sing due to her progressive supranuclear palsy, initially misdiagnosed as Parkinson’s disease.
