A quiet country ache where memory won’t loosen its grip, “I Still Miss Someone” lets Linda Ronstadt sing grief with dignity—no dramatics, just the honest weight of a name you can’t stop carrying.
By the time Linda Ronstadt recorded “I Still Miss Someone”, she was still in that early, searching stretch of her solo career—when the world hadn’t fully agreed on what she was (country? rock? pop?), but her instincts were already razor-sharp. Her version appears on her third solo studio album, Linda Ronstadt, released January 17, 1972 on Capitol Records. The album’s “ranking at launch,” in plain chart terms, was modest but real: it entered the U.S. Billboard 200 and peaked at #163 in March 1972. And importantly, “I Still Miss Someone” was not released as a single, so it has no standalone chart peak of its own—one of those deep cuts that lives by feeling rather than promotion.
The song she chose to inhabit already had the kind of history you don’t “cover” so much as you respect. “I Still Miss Someone” was written by Johnny Cash and Roy Cash Jr., and first recorded and released by Johnny Cash in 1958. It’s a masterpiece of restraint: a few plain images—falling leaves, a cold wind, sweethearts walking by—adding up to the most human admission of all. Not I’m destroyed, not I’ll never recover, but simply: I still miss someone. Time passes, the world keeps pairing off, and the heart remains stubbornly faithful to absence.
What makes Ronstadt’s interpretation so quietly devastating is that she doesn’t oversell the sorrow. On Linda Ronstadt (the album), the track is presented as a country standard among other classic-root choices—Ray Price’s “Crazy Arms,” Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces,” and Fontella Bass’ “Rescue Me”—a clear signal that she was building her identity by choosing songs with emotional backbone. “I Still Miss Someone” fits that theme perfectly: it’s not a heartbreak song about a fresh wound; it’s about the wound that becomes part of you.
Her voice—already unmistakable, already capable of making a single line feel lived-in—treats the lyric like a confession you don’t want to make but can’t avoid making. There’s a kind of self-control in her delivery that feels almost brave. She doesn’t turn the song into a performance of grief; she turns it into a portrait of endurance. The sadness isn’t loud. It’s steady. It’s the kind that shows up at the most ordinary moments: when you open the door, when the weather changes, when you see two people together and realize the world is moving on without asking your permission.
And there’s something especially poignant about her singing a Johnny Cash song in this era. Ronstadt, still years away from her arena-dominating run, was already aligning herself with writers who told the truth plainly. Cash’s writing here is not ornate—just precise—and Ronstadt honors that precision. She keeps the emotional posture of the original: upright, unsentimental, quietly haunted.
The meaning of “I Still Miss Someone” in Ronstadt’s hands becomes almost universal: it isn’t about romantic drama, it’s about the persistence of attachment. How memory can be both comfort and captivity. How love can outlive contact. How the mind can accept an ending long before the heart does. That’s why the song never really gets old—because it isn’t tied to a specific decade’s style of heartbreak. It’s tied to the way time works on human beings.
So if you come to this track expecting fireworks, you’ll miss its power. “I Still Miss Someone” is a candle, not a spotlight. It glows in the quiet. It belongs to the hours when you’re not trying to impress anyone with how “fine” you are. And that’s exactly why it lasts.
In the end, Linda Ronstadt doesn’t sing this song as if she’s trying to escape the feeling. She sings it as if she’s learned to live beside it—still breathing, still walking forward, still occasionally undone by something as small as leaves falling at the door.