On For Sentimental Reasons, Linda Ronstadt does something rarer than revival. With “Straighten Up and Fly Right,” she steps into Nat King Cole’s world and makes its wit, poise, and motion feel vividly present again.
Released in 1986, For Sentimental Reasons was the third and final album in Linda Ronstadt’s remarkable collaboration with Nelson Riddle and the Nelson Riddle Orchestra. By then, the project already carried a sense of artistic conviction. Ronstadt had entered the Great American Songbook after becoming one of the defining voices of 1970s rock and country-pop, and she did it without irony, without costume, and without trying to “update” the material into something more fashionable. On “Straighten Up and Fly Right,” that commitment is especially clear. This is not a singer borrowing a classic for prestige. It is a singer listening hard to the rhythm, the language, and the old intelligence inside the song.
The song itself arrived long before Ronstadt, first associated with Nat King Cole and written by Cole with Irving Mills. It grew out of a story Cole had known from childhood, and that origin matters, because the song has always carried more than a catchy hook. Its lyric offers advice, but with a smile and a side glance. It is playful, sly, and slightly cautionary at the same time. That balance can easily be lost if the performance becomes too cute or too polished. Ronstadt avoids both traps. She keeps the phrasing lean, keeps the beat alive under every line, and lets the humor arrive through timing rather than exaggeration.
What makes her version so striking is how completely she understands that swing is not just a period sound. It is a way of placing words against motion. Ronstadt had the vocal strength to overpower a chart like this if she wanted to, but she chooses something more skillful. She lightens the attack, sharpens the consonants, and rides the arrangement with the kind of relaxed accuracy that makes difficult singing sound natural. There is no sense of strain, and no trace of the self-consciousness that often appears when pop singers cross into older repertoire. Instead, she sounds alert, amused, and deeply inside the song’s architecture.
Nelson Riddle is central to that effect. Few arrangers understood elegance and momentum better. His work across mid-century American popular music had long shown that sophistication did not have to mean stiffness, and on Ronstadt’s standards recordings he gave her something priceless: structure without confinement. In “Straighten Up and Fly Right,” the orchestra does not sit behind her like a respectful museum piece. It moves with her. The pulse stays crisp, the ensemble answers and nudges, and the air around the vocal remains open enough for her phrasing to matter. That is one of the quiet triumphs of these Ronstadt-Riddle recordings. They sound formal only to people who are not really hearing the movement inside them.
There is also a larger cultural story in the performance. Ronstadt had already shown how naturally she could move between rock, country, mariachi, and pop, but the Riddle albums revealed something even deeper about her musicianship. She was not simply versatile. She was historically literate in the most musical sense of the phrase. She understood that genre is not a costume rack; it is a set of values, tensions, and habits of feeling. When she sings this Cole tune, she does not flatten it into generic nostalgia. She preserves its smile, its bounce, and its discipline. In doing so, she also reminds listeners that the distance between American pop generations is often smaller than the industry likes to pretend. A great singer can cross that distance if she respects the song enough to hear what it asks.
That may be why this recording still feels so fresh. It does not depend on novelty. The pleasure comes from precision, from style worn lightly, from the sensation of hearing a singer meet old material at exactly the right angle. Ronstadt does not try to out-Cole Cole, and she does not turn the number into a showy exercise in retro charm. She lets the tune keep its compact wisdom. She trusts the melody, trusts the rhythm section, trusts the arrangement, and, above all, trusts her own ability to inhabit a tradition without disappearing into imitation.
There is a tender irony in hearing this on For Sentimental Reasons, an album released after Nelson Riddle’s death and therefore shadowed by farewell even in its brightest moments. Yet “Straighten Up and Fly Right” does not sound mournful. It sounds alive, quick on its feet, and full of professional joy. That may be the deepest pleasure of it. Ronstadt proves that reverence need not be heavy, and that crossing genres at the highest level is really an act of listening. In her hands, an old swing admonition becomes something more enduring: a reminder that style, when it is honest, can still move with grace long after the era that first gave it shape.
