“I Still Miss Someone” is the kind of country song that doesn’t fade—it settles in, a plainspoken admission that time can move on while the heart stays politely behind.
Before Linda Ronstadt ever sang it, “I Still Miss Someone” already carried the stamp of a certain American truth: love doesn’t always end with a clean goodbye. The song was co-written by Johnny Cash and his nephew Roy Cash Jr., recorded by Cash on July 24, 1958, and first issued as the B-side to “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town.” That origin story matters, because it tells you what kind of song this is—one that didn’t need the front of the record to become essential. It’s the ache on the reverse side, the confession you don’t announce, the feeling you carry like a folded letter you never mail. And Cash kept returning to it for decades in performance, as if the song’s quiet hurt was too honest to ever outgrow.
Ronstadt recorded her version at a moment when her future fame was still just a possibility, not a certainty. Her cover appears on her 1972 self-titled album Linda Ronstadt (released January 17, 1972 on Capitol Records), where “I Still Miss Someone” sits as track 4 with a runtime of 2:42. The album itself was built across serious rooms—sessions at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Alabama and United Western Recorders in Hollywood, with some material cut live at The Troubadour—and produced by John Boylan. It even featured session work from Glenn Frey and Don Henley, months before the world knew them as the Eagles.
In chart terms, this was not yet the juggernaut era. Linda Ronstadt entered the Billboard 200 in February 1972 and peaked at No. 163 in March. The album’s singles were “I Fall to Pieces” and “Rock Me on the Water”—meaning “I Still Miss Someone” wasn’t pushed as a single statement to radio. And yet, that’s exactly how many great “missing someone” songs survive: not by being marketed loudly, but by being found—late at night, years later, when you’re finally ready to hear your own feelings reflected back at you.
What Ronstadt does with “I Still Miss Someone” is subtle, and that subtlety is the whole point. Johnny Cash sang it with a stoic, masculine stillness—hurt kept behind the eyes. Ronstadt, by contrast, brings a kind of luminous vulnerability: she doesn’t dramatize the sadness, but she lets it breathe. The line between strength and tenderness becomes thin enough to see through. She sings like someone who knows the difference between moving on and merely appearing to. In her phrasing, the title isn’t self-pity; it’s simple honesty. The song doesn’t ask permission to feel. It just admits that a person can be gone and still be present in the mind—quietly, persistently, like a familiar shadow in a familiar room.
There’s also something historically poignant about where she placed this cover. On Linda Ronstadt, she was stitching together a map of American song—country standards beside emerging singer-songwriters—almost as if she were building a home out of other people’s melodies. In that setting, “I Still Miss Someone” becomes more than a tribute to Cash; it becomes a confession of artistic identity. Ronstadt didn’t just “sing well.” She listened for the emotional nerve inside a song and pressed her voice directly onto it, like a thumbprint. That gift would later make her a superstar. Here, in 1972, you can hear it in its early, unforced form—no arena polish, no mythology required.
And that is the song’s enduring meaning when Ronstadt sings it: grief isn’t always loud. Sometimes it’s courteous. Sometimes it shows up in the ordinary moments—driving, washing dishes, looking at a street you used to share with someone—when you’re doing fine until you suddenly aren’t. “I Still Miss Someone” doesn’t try to heal you. It simply sits beside you and tells the truth in a steady voice. And in a world that often rewards the dramatic, that kind of steadiness can feel like the most intimate comfort of all.