Peter Dalton Ronstadt brings his special Southwestern blend of blues, folk, and acoustic rock to The Acoustic Stayaway. P.D. – Petie to his friends – delivers a unique musical experience featuring a solo vocals, guitars, banjo, and the Pennsylvania stomp box. This Tucson-based troubadour is best known as a key front man with his late father Michael for Ronstadt Generations, the family band that gave America a new and fresh look at traditional Southwestern and Mexican folk songs. Petie’s innovative original material is deeply sourced in his family’s roots, and that includes carrying forward a sound closely tied in his infancy to his father and, yes, his Aunt Linda, the beloved “First Lady of Rock” we all know and love and whose brain he loves picking for ideas on material and arrangements.
Peter sees himself along with his brothers as inheritors of a family musical tradition that dates back to their great-great-grandfather, Frederick Augustus Ronstadt, who emigrated from Germany in the 1840s, settled in the Southwest and fell in love with Mexican music. “Music was ingrained in us from a very young age,” Ronstadt says. “Whenever we would get together — with aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents — it would always involve food, and, after food, everyone would gather in the living room and sing.”