My phone died during soundcheck yesterday at the show but luckily a friend of the artist named Terry Dudley shot the show and sent me these photos today. It was my first time hearing Sony Holland. I caught her interview on KCSM jazz radio with Chris Cortez years ago then noticed while exploring the North Bay that she had an ad in the local paper about her Linda Ronstadt tribute show.

So I am saying – to the crowd and now here — that my concert series is a push-back against the media but I did use cues from terrestial radio and a weekly rag to add Sony Holland to my eclectic music series in a public plaza here (or two public forums, if you include my series at Mitch Bowl).

The duo ran thru about 12 of her classic songs, including one in Spanish. Sony had brief intro’s to most of the songs; she knew the authors of the songs and the producers of the albums. I had seen the recent documentary about Ronstadt. To two different people, I had mentioned that Linda was once partnered to our governor, Jerry Brown. To another I emphasized that she was Latina. Linda has Parkinson’s or a variation thereof so cannot speak for herself these days.

Jerry Holland is actually a Jewish songwriter from Connecticutt and New York who was on staff at the Nashville studios for a while. Sony is a former midwestern farm girl – -her maiden name is Einerson or Eisenhower — and she is a jazzbo. They played three originals for an encore and I think that those songs can find an audience.

I’m hoping to bring them back as soon as appropriate, and maybe sponsor them in the studio to put on tape their takes of “Blue Bayou”, “Poor Pitiful Me” and “Just One Look”. 

I don’t Gary White’s “Long Long Time” meant much to me at the time it was on KYA or KFRC or KLIV but somehow it pulls the heartstrings today. 

Jerry had an anecdote about Mike Reid the former NFL Bengal turned Nashville singer-songwriter and a hit he had — slang for popular song, not separating Roman Gabriel from his chinstrap — about writing something in one mood, looking at it later, confusedly then finding the right tone for it.

Story of my life, actually.

It’s a hit

note an earlier version had a headline referencing a song that was not part of Sony  and Jerry Holland‘s Ronstadt tribute at Lytton Plaza Thursday the ninth.