So, this song popped into my head a couple days ago, as these things do from time to time, and it hasn’t left yet. After having a fairly amusing conversation about it with my friend Anastasia, I thought maybe I’d share it with all you fine people, too. You can thank me later.

The song is called “Willin’,” and I was frankly amazed that Anastasia — or anyone else in my circle of friends — actually knew it, as I’ve always thought of it as somewhat obscure. It was originally recorded by the band Little Feat, and I like their version fine, but it is Linda Ronstadt’s 1974 cover that’s been on a continuous loop in my brain this week. Probably because her version was my first exposure to it. I’ll talk about that in a moment, but first… the song:

I first encountered “Willin'” in a fairly unlikely context: you can hear about 10 seconds of it in one scene of James Cameron’s film The Abyss. If you don’t know that one, much of the story takes place inside an experimental underwater oil-drilling platform on the bottom of the ocean. In the scene in question, the rig is being towed to a new location, and as the camera zooms in on the cockpit of the “tug sub,” the overalls-wearing pilot is singing along to this tune — coming from a boombox duct-taped above her seat — at the top of her lungs. Specifically, the line about driving every kind of rig that’s ever been made. It’s a cute gag — what’s a sub, after all, but another kind of rig? — that serves to illustrate the earthy, blue-collar, average-jane-and-joe aspect of the movie’s characters. They’re roughnecks and truck drivers, despite their science-fictiony surroundings.

Well, that brief snippet of incidental music was enough to pique my curiosity. It took me a long time to identify the song and track it down, and when I heard it all the way through for the first time, I loved it. But I also thought it was kind of weird. After all, here was a woman signing longingly about another woman, that beautiful girl back in Dallas… The song made a lot more sense when I learned it had been written for a man. Of course, this was in the early ’90s, before I developed a taste for Melissa Etheridge and Joan Jett, and got used to the idea of women singing love songs about women.

MTV-style music videos were still several years in the future when Linda Ronstadt recorded “Willin’,” so all the clips I found of it were concert recordings. But that’s fine, considering her skill with live performance. This particular one was made at the New Victoria Theatre in London, in November 1976, when Ronstadt was in her heyday as a rock-and-roll artist. She was also (I think) incredibly sexy at the time. The look on her face when she first says “willin'” about 20 seconds in… well, it does happy things for me.

I remember I used to have a poster of her that I won at a county fair midway game. This would’ve been in the mid ’80s, by which time Linda was moving past her rocker persona and starting to explore traditional songbook pop, so I’ve long suspected the carnie was trying to move some very old stock. Regardless, I had no idea then of who she was… but I hung the poster anyway because I liked her looks. I recall she was wearing a lot of bangles and a button-down shirt in the picture, and generally looked very soft and feminine in the way that 1970s “rocker chicks” had, and which went away in the more harshly-styled ’80s. (I’ll be honest, even though I tend to rhapsodize a great deal about the ’80s — the decade in which I was a teenager — I generally think women’s looks were sexier in the the ’70s.)

I’m just rambling at this point, so I’ll leave you with the song and bid you all a good weekend. I’m going to head home now. And when I get there, I think maybe I’ll fire up my old turntable and listen to some vintage Linda Ronstadt LPs…