A small country prayer at the crossroads, when a wounded heart says: “You decide if we go on”
On her 1970 album Silk Purse, Linda Ronstadt slips “I’m Leavin’ It All Up To You” into side two like a short, quiet confession spoken at the end of a long day. The album itself was a turning point—her second solo record, recorded in Nashville, the one where she leaned fully into country influences and, for the first time, nudged her way onto the album charts in the US, Canada and Australia. Silk Purse would only climb to the lower reaches of the Billboard 200, but it carried the earliest hints of what she would become: a singer able to take other people’s songs and make them feel as if they’d been waiting all along for her voice.
“I’m Leavin’ It All Up To You” wasn’t a new song when she chose it. Written by Don Harris and Dewey Terry, it first appeared in the late 1950s, before becoming a No. 1 hit in 1963 for the duo Dale & Grace, and then a top-five success again in 1974 for Donny & Marie Osmond. By the time it reached Linda Ronstadt’s hands, it was already a small standard: a gently pleading ballad where one lover, exhausted and unsure, lays their heart down and says, in effect, I can’t fight for both of us—tell me whether there is still anything here to save.
Her version on Silk Purse is shorter than you might expect, barely over two minutes, but it holds a whole story in that small space. The Nashville players cradle her in a classic, understated arrangement: a loping country pulse, a touch of steel guitar that seems to sigh in all the right places, and a rhythm section that never rushes her feelings. There’s nothing flashy here, no studio trickery—just the honest sound of musicians giving a wounded little song enough room to breathe.
At the center, as always, is that unmistakable voice. On Silk Purse, Linda Ronstadt is still young, still searching, not yet the powerhouse of Heart Like a Wheel and the platinum years. You can hear a bit of insecurity in the edges, but it’s exactly that vulnerability that makes “I’m Leavin’ It All Up To You” so touching. She doesn’t sing it like a polished star; she sings it like a woman who really is standing in that doorway of doubt, asking someone she loves to finally speak plainly.
The emotional core of the song is simple and painfully familiar. One person has done all the wondering, all the questioning, perhaps all the apologizing they know how to do. They are tired of guessing, tired of reading meaning into every glance and pause. So they do the bravest—and hardest—thing: they hand the decision to the other. Do you still want my love, or are we through? It’s such a small sentence, but when Linda sings it, you can feel the weight of it resting in the silence after each phrase.
In her reading, there is no anger, no dramatic accusation. Instead, there is something that older ears will recognize immediately: that mixture of sorrow and dignity that comes when you’ve reached the limit of what you can hold together by yourself. The voice is soft, but it is not weak. She’s not saying, “I don’t care.” She’s saying, “I care so much that I can’t pretend anymore.”
Within Silk Purse, surrounded by songs like “Long Long Time”, “Lovesick Blues”, and “Will You Love Me Tomorrow”, this track adds another shade to the album’s portrait of love—less grand than some, but perhaps more intimate. If “Long Long Time” is the long cry of unreturned devotion, “I’m Leavin’ It All Up To You” is the quiet moment afterward, when the tears have mostly dried and what remains is a simple, honest question. It is the sound of someone who is tired of chasing an answer around in circles and has finally placed it, very carefully, in another person’s hands.
For listeners with many years behind them, the song may stir memories that have nothing to do with charts or discographies. It might recall a night at a kitchen table, or a walk taken a little slower than usual, when similar words were spoken—maybe not as neatly rhymed, but just as hesitant and just as brave. It may bring back the feeling of knowing that the next sentence from the other person would decide the shape of the years ahead.
There is also a kind of nostalgia in the way this recording sounds. The slight tape hiss, the warmth of early-’70s Nashville production, the unhurried musicianship—all of it evokes a time when songs like this spilled out of car radios and small transistor speakers, finding their way into everyday lives without ceremony. Many people first heard Linda Ronstadt not as a superstar, but as a young woman with a clear, aching voice, singing the same doubts and hopes that were quietly echoing in their own hearts.
In the end, “I’m Leavin’ It All Up To You” as sung by Linda Ronstadt is not a showpiece; it is a moment. A moment when pride loosens its grip, when someone stops trying to control the answer and simply asks for the truth. The song ends without telling us what that answer is. Perhaps that’s why it lingers. It leaves you sitting there in that pause, remembering your own unanswered questions, your own crossroads, and all the times you, too, handed your heart across the table and waited to see whether the other person would hold it… or quietly let it go.