“Everybody Loves a Winner” is Linda Ronstadt singing about the cold arithmetic of fame—how applause can feel like love, until the moment your luck changes and the room grows quiet.
“Everybody Loves a Winner” sits on Linda Ronstadt’s pivotal 1973 album Don’t Cry Now, released on October 1, 1973—her first album for Asylum Records, and the record that began steering her toward the blockbuster years just ahead. This track was not released as a charting single from the album (the singles were “Love Has No Pride,” “Silver Threads and Golden Needles,” and “Colorado”), so it doesn’t have a debut-week Hot 100 position to recite. But its importance is quieter and, in some ways, more revealing: it shows Ronstadt choosing a song whose message cuts against celebrity comfort, even as her own star was rising.
The song’s authorship is essential to understanding its soul. “Everybody Loves a Winner” was written by Booker T. Jones and William Bell, and it was first recorded and released by William Bell in 1967—a piece of Stax-shaped realism, built from the kind of truth that doesn’t need metaphor. In other words, Ronstadt isn’t borrowing a pop trifle here. She’s borrowing a moral observation from Southern soul: a line about human nature that lands like a verdict—when you lose, you lose alone.
That sentence is the song’s quiet punch, and Ronstadt delivers it with the particular gift she had in abundance in the early ’70s: a voice that can sound both clear as glass and wounded underneath. On Don’t Cry Now, she was already a remarkable interpreter, but she was still in the stage where interpretation felt like biography—where each cover sounded less like “material” and more like a diary page chosen because it matched her heartbeat. The album itself was a commercial step forward, peaking at No. 45 on the Billboard 200 and spending 56 weeks on the chart—evidence of a growing audience that didn’t just sample her voice, but stayed with it.
What makes “Everybody Loves a Winner” feel almost haunting in this context is its timing. A singer on the verge of major mainstream success decides to sing, plainly, about the fickleness of admiration—about friends who “begin to hide” when your bankroll runs down. The lyric is not angry; it’s observant. It doesn’t beg for pity; it names a pattern. And that pattern has the sting of recognition, because the song isn’t only about show business. It’s about any world where status changes the temperature of a room—workplaces, social circles, even families at times. The line is universal because it’s painfully ordinary: people like winning because it flatters them to stand near it.
Ronstadt’s arrangement on Don’t Cry Now keeps that message accessible—country-rock polish with enough pop sheen to invite repeated listening—yet the emotional center remains soul music’s oldest lesson: love and approval are not always the same thing. In her performance, you can hear a kind of adult steadiness: she doesn’t oversell the pain. She lets the lyric do what it was designed to do—tell the truth with a calm voice, the way someone speaks after the shock has passed and the clarity has arrived.
And that’s the lasting meaning of “Everybody Loves a Winner.” It isn’t cynical for sport; it’s caution shaped into melody. It reminds you that praise can be loud and still be shallow, that smiles can be plentiful and still be temporary, and that the most valuable companionship often reveals itself only when the “winning” stops. Ronstadt sings it not as a sermon, but as a sober little memoir in three minutes—one that still feels fresh because the human habit it describes hasn’t aged a day.