"Hey mister, that's me up on the jukebox," Linda Ronstadt sings on her 1975 album Prisoner in Disguise, and it was no idle boast. The album yielded two of her finest singles, thanks to the retooled Motown classics "Heat Wave" and "Tracks of My Tears." The album's support material is just as strong, ranging from a banjo-strumming version of Neil Young's "Love Is a Rose" to a plaintive pop reading of Jimmy Cliff's reggae classic "Many Rivers to Cross." There's also a simple but lovely cover of Dolly Parton's "I Will Always Love You" that predates Whitney Houston's glass-shattering take on it (for the movie The Bodyguard) by more than a decade and a half. One thing about Ronstadt and producer-manager Peter Asher: they knew good material when they heard it and almost always turned it into something truly special. --Daniel Durchholz