A gentle refusal wrapped in resolve — “I Won’t Be Hangin’ ’Round” turns goodbye into a clear horizon, not a wound
Set the record straight at the very start: “I Won’t Be Hangin’ ’Round” is an album cut by Linda Ronstadt, written by Eric Kaz, and placed as track three on Side One of her self-titled Linda Ronstadt LP, released January 17, 1972. It runs a concise 3:03, never issued as a single; the album itself reached No. 163 on the Billboard 200 and No. 87 on Japan’s Oricon chart. The track was cut with a Muscle Shoals core—Roger Hawkins on drums, David Hood on bass, Barry Beckett on keyboards—and bolstered by shimmering backing voices from Merry Clayton, Dianne Davidson, and “Miss Ona.”
What a small, luminous thing this song is. Where some break-up numbers beg, this one breathes. In Ronstadt’s phrasing, the title isn’t a slammed door; it’s the soft click of a latch at dusk, a promise to oneself spoken without anger. Her voice steps into the lyric with a steadiness that feels like morning light. There’s no courtroom drama here, no last-chance pleas—only the calm of someone who has counted the empty hours and chosen, finally, to keep her own time.
The Muscle Shoals rhythm section holds her like clear water. Hawkins’s drums don’t argue; they support, a heartbeat that refuses to hurry. Hood’s bass moves in patient, rounded phrases, letting every syllable land; Beckett paints the edges with warm keys. And then those background voices—Merry Clayton among them—rise like a kindly wind behind Ronstadt, not to gild the ache, but to carry it away. The whole arrangement feels modest on purpose, as if everyone in the room understood that the power of this song lies not in volume, but in the way a single line can stand up straight and walk out into day.
Part of the song’s quiet authority comes from Eric Kaz. He was writing with the tender, plainspoken acuity that would yield other essentials—most famously “Love Has No Pride,” which Ronstadt would claim in 1973. Here, his lyric gives her a posture rather than a pose: resolve without rancor, independence without bravado. She answers in kind, turning each phrase with that unforced clarity that would soon change the temperature of radio rooms and concert halls alike.
Hear how the band’s lift keeps the sadness from sinking. The tempo isn’t quite a stroll and never a march; it’s a forward lean, the body learning again how to move through space without looking back over its shoulder. That’s the song’s secret: it understands that leaving is not a scene—it’s a rhythm. And Ronstadt, even this early, has the rare gift of sounding both intimate and unbreakable, as if she’s telling the story to one person in a quiet room while the world outside goes on turning.
Placed on Linda Ronstadt—a set that mingles country standards with new singer-songwriter material—the track becomes a hinge between traditions: the steadfastness of classic country and the candid light of the then-new country-rock West Coast. The album’s modest chart showing almost flatters it; you can feel the workbench behind the music, the sense of a singer building the instrument she would carry through the decade. And this song, small as it seems on paper, is one of the truest planks in that boat.
For those who lived with these records—who remember sleeves faintly smelling of cardboard and sunlight—the first bars of “I Won’t Be Hangin’ ’Round” call back a particular kind of courage. Not the noisy kind that announces itself, but the everyday courage of choosing not to wait at a door that never opens. It is a hymn for clean exits, for returning the afternoon to yourself.
When the last chord fades, what lingers isn’t bitterness; it’s space. A room cleared, a window unlatched, the weather shifting just enough to let you breathe. That’s the grace Linda Ronstadt brings here: a goodbye that doesn’t wound or warn—it simply releases. And long after the needle lifts, that feeling remains, bright as a path you finally take, certain as your own footsteps, and—like the title promises—refusing to linger where love has already left.