From The Times of London
The 100 greatest singers of all time (Rolling Stone)
Since Elvis transformed polite pop music into rock 50-odd years ago, thousands of vocalists have entertained, moved and inspired us. To identify the best, Rolling Stone magazine polled nearly 200 musicians and pundits. Here are the results, alongside tributes from their famous fans
Aretha Franklin is a gift from God, says Mary J Blige.
There’s something about a voice that’s personal, not unlike the particular odour or shape of a given human body. Summoned through belly, hammered into form by the throat, given propulsion by bellows of lungs, teased into final form by tongue and lips, a vocal is a kind of audible kiss, a blurted confession you really can’t keep from issuing as you make your way through the material world.
The beauty of the singer’s voice touches us in a place that’s as personal as the place from which that voice has issued. If one of the weird things about singers is the ecstasy of surrender they inspire, another weird thing is the debunking response a singer can arouse once we’ve recovered our senses.
If a vocal performance that tenderises our hearts is a kind of high-wire walk, an act both breathtaking and preposterous, we can reassure ourselves that Neil Young or Gillian Welch or Joe Strummer have at least dug the foundations for the poles and strung the wire themselves. Singers reliant on existing or made-to-fit material, such as Janis Joplin, Whitney Houston or Roger Daltrey, might just be birds alighting on someone else’s wire. Listening to them, we may derive a certain thrill from wondering if they find the same meaning in the lyrics they’re putting across that the lyrics’ writer intended, or any meaning at all.
This points to what defines great singing in the rock-and-soul era: that some underlying tension exists in the space between singer and song. A bridge is being built across a void, and it’s a bridge we’re never sure the singer’s going to manage to cross. The gulf may reside between vocal texture and the actual meaning of the words, or between the singer and band, musical genre, style of production or the audience’s expectations. The simplest example comes at the moment of the style’s inception, ie, Elvis Presley: at first, listeners thought that the white guy was a black guy. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that when Ed Sullivan’s television show tossed this disjunction into everyone’s living rooms, American culture was thrilled by it but also a little deranged, in ways it hasn’t got over.
Ultimately, the nature of the vocals in post-Elvis, post-Sam Cooke, post-Ray Charles popular music is the same as the role of the instrumental soloist in jazz. If it isn’t pushing against the boundaries of its form, it isn’t doing anything at all. Etta James, Ray Davies, Mama Cass, Mark Kozelek, Levi Stubbs Jr – these might not all seem like protest singers, but they are always singing against something; whether in themselves, in the band backing them, in the world they live in or the material they’ve been given.
We judge pre-rock singing by how perfectly the lyric is served. That’s the standard Frank Sinatra exemplified. We judge popular vocals since 1956 by what the singer unearths that the song itself could never quite. It explains why voices such as Joan Baez or Emmylou Harris or Billy Joel never really seem to be singing in the contemporary idiom, no matter how much they roughen up their material or accompaniment, and why Elvis – or Dylan – is always rock, even singing Blue Moon. It also explains precisely why such virtuosic pipes as Aretha Franklin’s – or, yes, Karen Carpenter’s – function in the new tradition. No lyric written by them or anyone else could ever express what their voices needed to, and they weren’t going to wait for the instrumental solo, or for the flourish of strings, to put it across for them. They got it into their voice, and their voices got it out into the air, and from there it passed into our bodies.
HOW THE VOTES WERE CAST
Rolling Stone magazine assembled a panel of 179 judges from the ranks of musicians and singers, record company executives and music industry insiders, journalists and Rolling Stone staff. Each voter was asked to list his or her 20 favourite vocalists from the rock era, in order of their importance. Those ballots were recorded and weighted according to methodology developed by the accounting firm of Ernst & Young, which then tabulated and verified the results for Rolling Stone magazine. Jonathan Lethem
THE TOP 10
1 ARETHA FRANKLIN by Mary J. Blige
You know a force from heaven. You know something that God made. And Aretha is a gift from God. When it comes to expressing yourself through song, there is no one who can touch her. She is the reason why women want to sing.
Aretha has everything – the power, the technique. She is honest with everything she says. Everything she’s thinking or dealing with is all in the music, from Chain of Fools to Respect to her live performances. And she has total confidence; she does not waver at all. I think her gospel base brings that confidence, because in gospel they do not play around – they’re all about chops. This is no game to her.
As a child, I used to listen to Aretha’s music because my mom played Do Right Woman and Ain’t No Way every single day. I would see my mother cry when she listened to those songs, and I’d cry, too. Then I discovered her on my own with the Sparkle soundtrack. I must have played Giving Him Something He Can Feel 30 times in a row; eventually, I connected the dots to that voice my mom was listening to.
When you watch her work, you can see why Aretha is who she is. When we did the song Don’t Waste Your Time on my album Mary, she just went in there and ate that record like Pac-Man. She could be doing a church vocal run, and it would turn into some jazz-space thing; something I never encountered before. You’d say, “Where did that come from? Where did she find that note?” It’s beautiful to see, because it helps people with a lack of confidence in their ability, like myself. I look at her and think, “I need a piece of that. Whatever that is.”
2 RAY CHARLES by Billy Joel
Ray Charles had the most unique voice in popular music. He would do these improvisational things, a little laugh or a “Huh-hey!” It was as if something struck him as he was singing and he just had to react to it. He was getting a kick out of what he was doing. And his joy was infectious. Ray started out wanting to be Nat King Cole. When Nat went down low in a song, like Mona Lisa, there was a growl in there that was kind of sexy. Ray took that to a whole other level. He took the growl and turned it into singing. He took the yelp, the whoop, the grunt, the groan, and made them music.
Also, he was a piano player. The piano is a percussion instrument. You put your body into it. Ray had a lot of unique body movements I didn’t know until I saw him. Before I saw him, I heard those movements as he sang. I heard his shoulder go up a little on the left side, the way he lifted himself off the stool. Then I realised the voice I was hearing was also playing that piano.
The first Ray Charles I heard was Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. He’d had hits before that, the R&B stuff, like What’d I Say. But here is a black man giving you the whitest possible music in the blackest possible way, while all hell is breaking loose with the civil rights movement. When he sang You Don’t Know Me, I thought, “He isn’t just singing the lyrics. He’s saying, ‘You don’t know me. Get to know me.’”
Ray synthesised the blues into a language everybody could relate to. You can’t listen to Ray Charles and not say, “This is a man who felt deeply, who has lived this music.” He shows you his humanity. The spontaneity is evident. Another guy might say, “That was a mistake, we can’t leave that in.” No, Ray left it in. The mistake became the hook.
3 ELVIS PRESLEY by Robert Plant
There is a difference between people who sing and those who take that voice to another, otherworldly place; who create a euphoria within themselves. It’s transfiguration. And having met Elvis, I know he was a transformer. The first Elvis song I heard was Hound Dog. I heard this voice and it was absolutely, totally in its own place. The voice was confident, insinuating and taking no prisoners. He had those great whoops and diving moments, those sustains that swoop down to the note like a bird of prey.
I met Elvis with Zeppelin, after one of his concerts in the early Seventies. He wasn’t quite as tall as me. But he had a singer’s build. He had a good chest – that resonator. And he was driven. Anyway You Want Me is one of the most moving vocal performances I’ve ever heard. There is no touching Jailhouse Rock and the stuff recorded at the King Creole sessions. I can study the Sun sessions as a middle-aged guy looking back at a bloke’s career and go, “Wow, what a great way to start.” But I liked the modernity of the RCA stuff. I Need Your Love Tonight and A Big Hunk o’ Love were so powerful – those sessions sounded like the greatest place to be on the planet.
At that meeting, Jimmy Page joked with Elvis that we never sound-checked, but if we did, all I wanted to do was sing Elvis songs. Elvis thought that was funny and asked me, “Which songs do you sing?” I told him I liked the ones with all the moods, like that great country song Love Me – “Treat me like a fool/ Treat me mean and cruel/ But love me.” So when we were leaving, after a most illuminating and funny 90 minutes with the guy, I was walking down the corridor. He swung round the door frame, looking quite pleased with himself, and started singing that song: “Treat me like a fool?” I turned around and did Elvis right back at him. We stood there, singing to each other.
By then, because of the forces around him, it was difficult for him to stretch out with more contemporary songwriters. When he died, he was 42. I’m 18 years older than that now. But he didn’t have many fresh liaisons to draw on – his old pals weren’t going to bring him the new gospel. I know he wanted to express more. But what he did was he made it possible for me, as a singer, to become otherworldly.
4 SAM COOKE by Van Morrison
If a singer is not singing from the soul, I do not even want to listen to it – it’s not for me. Sam Cooke reached down deep with pure soul. He had the rare ability to do gospel the way it’s supposed to be – he made it real, clean, direct. Gospel drove Sam Cooke through his greatest songs, as it did for Ray Charles, who came first, and Otis Redding. He had an incomparable voice. Sam Cooke could sing anything and make it work. But when you’re talking about his strength as a singer, range is not relevant. It was his power to deliver – it was about his phrasing, the totality of his singing.
He did a lot of great songs, but Bring It On Home to Me is a favourite. It’s a song that’s written to allow you to go wherever you can with it. A Change Is Gonna Come is another song I covered; it’s a great arrangement. Not many people can play this music any more, not the way Sam Cooke did it, coming directly from the church. What can we learn from a singer like him, from listening to songs like A Change Is Gonna Come? It depends on who the singer is and what they are capable of, where their head is and how serious they are. But Sam Cooke was born to sing.
5 JOHN LENNON by Jackson Browne
There was a tremendous intimacy in everything John Lennon did, combined with a formidable intellect. That is what makes him a great singer. In Girl, on Rubber Soul, he starts in this steely, high voice: “Is there anybody going to listen to my story?” It’s so impassioned, like somebody stepping from the shadows in a room. But when he comes to the chorus, you suddenly realise: he’s talking directly to her.
He had a confidence, a certainty about what he was feeling that carried over into everything he sang. One of the things about John Lennon and the Beatles that went by a lot of people was how unusual it was for people in their class, from Liverpool, to be catapulted into the higher reaches of entertainment and society without disguising their working-class roots and voices. It was such an audacious thing to do, not to change who they were. That was the heart of John Lennon’s singing – to say who he was and where he was from.
He didn’t sing very loud. I got that sense when I was learning Oh My Love from Imagine. That song has to be done quietly, which turns out to be a feat of strength. It’s ironic – to sing high and quiet, you have to be physically strong. In I’m Only Sleeping on Revolver he sounds sleepy, like he’s half in bed as he sings. Or I’m So Tired, on the White Album – there is an irritableness to it. These songs live in you because of the remarkable facility of the singer to inhabit those moments and portray them. Imagine is a masterful performance. He inhabits that idea – our innermost longing for a world in which peace is real – when he sings it. And it is sung with fearlessness, without erring on either side – polemic or sappy. It’s wonderful to have an idea expressed so well that everybody can sing it. That’s a song he made you want to sing.
The more he developed as a writer, he was able to show his voice in various contexts. There is a thrilling aloneness in the way he sings A Day in the Life. His singing on John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band is to the bone. He willed himself to express his pain: “Mother/ You had me/ But I never had you.” It’s a crushing depiction that stays with you for ever. Double Fantasy is less tortured – there is a lot of happiness there. The singing is just beautiful, perhaps more the product of singing at home, to his son. John Lennon went through a lot to have the life he had. He gave up some things to get others. And he died before a lot of those themes could be examined.
But it was a stunning thing – he always told the truth. He felt he had the right to talk about this stuff, and that gives his voice a singular identity. It’s not the chops of a heralded singer – no one goes on about his actual technique. He went right to what he felt, what he had to say.
6 MARVIN GAYE by Alicia Keys
There’s no sound like Marvin Gaye: the way he sang so softly, almost gently – but also with so much power. That came straight from the heart. Everything in his life – everything that he thought and felt – affected his singing. The first time I was really introduced to Marvin Gaye was the What’s Going On album, and I fell in love. It was so moving to hear him talk so desperately about the state of the world, on top of all that brilliant musicality. One of my favourite things he did was to follow the strings with his voice, or double things that the instruments are doing. There’s such a simple, subtle lushness to it that adds this whole other layer to the music.
These days we have a thousand tracks, and you can do different vocals on every track. But back then you really had to innovate, like the way Marvin answered himself in songs, or all that really distant backing work, where his voice is all the way in the back and echoing. It’s haunting; he delivered every single song with such clarity that it gave me chills. The live version of Distant Lover has to be one of the most incredible performances ever captured on tape. You can feel his confidence, his yearning – you can imagine his movements. The entire audience is hanging on his every word; he’s teasing them the whole time. That’s what makes Marvin Gaye immortal: the emotion that he evokes.
7 BOB DYLAN by Bono
I first heard Bob Dylan’s voice in the dark, when I was 13 years old, on my friend’s record player. It was his greatest-hits album, the first one. The voice was at once modern, in all the things it was railing against, and very ancient. It felt strangely familiar to an Irishman. We thought America was full of superheroes, but it was a much humbler people in these songs – farmers, people who have had great injustices done to them. The really unusual thing about Bob Dylan was that, for a moment in the Sixties, he felt like the future. He was the voice of a generation, raised against the generation that came before. Then he became the voice of all the generations, the voices in the ground – these ghosts from the Thirties and the Dust Bowl, the romance of Gershwin and the music hall. For me, the pictures of him in his polka-dot shirt, the Afro and pointy shoes – that was a brief flash of lightning. His voice is usually put to the service of more ancient characters.
Here are some of the adjectives I have found myself using to describe that voice: howling, seducing, raging, imploring, begging, hectoring, confessing, keening, wailing, soothing, conversational, crooning. It is a voice like smoke, from cigar to incense, where it’s full of wonder and worship. There is a voice for every Dylan you can meet, and the reason I’m never bored with Bob Dylan is because there are so many of them, all centred on the idea of pilgrimage. People forget that Bob Dylan had to warm up for Dr Martin Luther King before he made his great “I have a dream” speech – the preacher preceded by the pilgrim.
Dylan did with singing what Brando did with acting. He busted through the artifice to get to the art. Both of them tore down the prissy rules laid down by the schoolmarms of their craft, broke through the fourth wall, got in the audience’s face and said, “I dare you to think I’m kidding.”
8 OTIS REDDING by Booker T. Jones
The first time I saw Otis, I had no idea who he was. It was on the sidewalk at 926 East McLemore Avenue in Memphis, which was Stax Records. This guy was unloading equipment and suitcases from a station wagon, taking it into the studio. He was a driver for the singer Johnny Jenkins. I didn’t see him much the rest of the day until later, when he asked for his audition. He sang These Arms of Mine.
It was in B-flat. It didn’t seem like an audition at all. It was a performance. It wasn’t the size of his voice – we knew lots of people with vocal powers like that. It was the intent with which he sang. He was all emotion. It was like, “This guy is definitely not singing for the money.” I don’t think he ever did.
Range was not a factor in his singing. His range was somewhat limited. He had no really low notes and no really high notes. But Otis would do anything that implied emotion, and that’s where his physicality came in, because he was such a strong, powerful man. Backstage, he would be like a prizefighter waiting to get out there. Playing Respect live with him was just energy and relentless joy.
Without singing, Otis was more distracted, not sure of himself. He couldn’t make the same movements in the studio when he sang. He was more restricted. You got the impression, though. He would do that thing where he stomped the left foot, then the right. And we all played with more intensity around him. He had that magnetism – “I’m a man!” – and he knew it, too.
These Arms of Mine is still Otis’s signature song for me. It is so simple in its beauty and message. Here is a young man singing to a girl: “If you would even consider being with me, how happy I would be.” That’s such a basic emotion. That’s how he sang it, and that’s what got him over.
9 STEVIE WONDER by Cee-Lo
To me, Stevie Wonder’s voice always sounds like tears of joy – like he’s right on the verge of crying, but it’s out of glee and peace, as opposed to the pain of someone like a Sly Stone.
There’s a richness to his voice, a clarity to all of its inflections. That vibrato is so impactful and piercing, but he never loses that underlying straightforward singing voice. His lack of sight must heighten his other senses, his ability to imagine and feel. It makes his music very visual, very graphic.
The first time I remember hearing Stevie Wonder was when I heard him singing Fingertips in the movie Cooley High. I was in awe of this child’s ability to see himself so clearly and be so sure of himself so young. Then I had to go back and discover Stevie Wonder as a whole. My uncle had an album collection, so I had seen Talking Book and Innervisions, but I knew the covers before I knew the music. I got turned on to his amazing performances such as Superwoman, I Ain’t Gonna Stand for It and, of course, Ribbon in the Sky – that song is so simple, but it’s so significant. His voice has so much variation and such diversity.
His confidence and his sense of self are just supernatural. Stevie Wonder knows exactly who he is, what role and responsibility he’s been given. But he revels in being chosen, singled out, and that’s what makes him who he is. He’s like a miracle.
10 JAMES BROWN by Iggy Pop
For me, James Brown was never just the voice. It was the whole package. But the impact of that voice gave me hope, because it was a simple presentation and didn’t trade on range. And there was that scream. It was like an inner voice. It sounded like an assertion of rights of primitive man. He used to describe his dancing as “African nerve control”. He had a point. He was a terrific editor. The one that flipped me out – I still remember being in the car, hearing it – is I Can’t Stand It. He was down to f*** the chorus, f*** the melody. This is barely a riff. But he pushes the group along like the coxswain on a Roman galley: Stroke,motherf*****, uh!
He always has an edge in his ballads where he lets you know it’s real. There’s a lesser-known one called Mama’s Dead. It just kills me. At the end, after he’s sung all these heavy things, he just says, “Everybody got a mother, and you know what I’m talkin’ about.” Or in the chorus of It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World – a lesser artist would say, “It wouldn’t mean nothin’ without a woman.” Or “without a girl”. But they wouldn’t say both. And it’s not just a lyric. He is singing something primitive and basic. He tells you how society runs. Man makes this, this is how money works. Maybe that comes from being somebody who didn’t have many things when he started out. The part in his autobiography that always gets me is when he lived with his dad, tapping the pine trees for resin. You’re down to real poverty.
The big thing I got from him was, don’t just stand there and look at your shoe. F*** that. It had to be like something’s going on here. He always sounds like he’s breaking loose. Once you’ve made the decision to go out in front of people and start moving around, it frees up so many things. You’re now creating movement in a society that’s based on order. And within yourself, you feel different. That motion makes you make decisions as a vocalist, decisions that free you from the stilted stuff.
In those situations, music has a cathartic power, and the guys who do it, they know that. That’s why James Brown could call himself Soul Brother Number One – and nobody ever said he was bragging.
And the best of all the rest...
17 TINA TURNER
“I’ll never forget the first time I saw [Tina] perform,” says Beyoncé. “I never in my life saw a woman so powerful, so fearless.” Turner started touring with the Ike and Tina Turner Revue almost half a century ago; her breakthrough was their blazing 1971 cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Proud Mary, which included the declaration that she never does anything “nice and easy”. “She was so direct, so raw,” says John Fogerty, who wrote the song. Age has only deepened the ache and grit in her powerhouse cries and moans during her long career as a solo artist. Melissa Etheridge says, “She can squeeze passion from any line.”
16 MICK JAGGER by Lenny Kravitz
I sometimes talk to people who sing perfectly in a technical sense who don’t understand Mick Jagger. But what he does is so complex: his sense of pitch and melody is really sophisticated. His vocals are stunning, flawless in their own kind of perfection. There are certain songs where he just becomes a different person. Take Angie: I’ve never heard that tone from him since, and it wasn’t there before. And I love when he sings falsetto, like on Emotional Rescue or Fool to Cry. I like him best when he’s singing super-raw. When I co-produced God Gave Me Everything, he did what he thought would be a scratch vocal. He barely knew the lyric – he was reading off a piece of paper. There were no stops, just one take. Bam! It ended up being the vocal we used on the record.
Mick is a disciplined artist, completely dedicated to his craft. His voice has changed somewhat and has a different texture, but it’s stronger now. One time the Stones were on tour, and during a two-week break Mick and I went on vacation in the Bahamas. In the evening he would go to the bottom floor of the place where we were staying and put on a Rolling Stones sound-check tape – just the band playing songs without him singing. He would stay down there, dancing and singing to keep himself in shape. Your voice is like a muscle. If you’re on the road and you stop for two weeks and then go back to do a show, you’re going to get hoarse. So he was down there every night practising. As a result, at 65 years of age, he’s stronger than ever.
28 JANIS JOPLIN by Melissa Etheridge
“She was shaking that shake that she did, and was screaming. I’d never seen anything like it,” says Melissa Etheridge of seeing Janis Joplin on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1969. Joplin’s gravelly rasp, over the psychedelic blues of Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the rough-hewn country soul on her later solo albums, represented a different approach for female vocalists: wild and uninhibited yet focused and deliberate. Her performances were more about passionate abandon than perfect pitch. “She would just kinda sing and scream and cry,” says Etheridge, “and she’d sound like an old black woman – which is what she was trying to sound like.”
60 BJÖRK by Chris Martin
When you land in Iceland, you feel like you’re somewhere a bit magical. Maybe it’s the volcanic activity, maybe it’s the dried fish, but something’s going on: everyone seems to be extraordinarily beautiful, and everyone appears to be able to sing. Their singers are so far ahead of everyone else – especially Björk. Her voice is so specific and such a new colour. Now that she’s been around for 20 years, everyone forgets quite how extraordinary she is. She could be singing the theme from Sesame Street, and it would sound completely different to how anyone else would do it, and completely magical.
She first crossed my radar on Big Time Sensuality, from that video where she’s on the back of a flatbed truck. I really got into her on Homogenic, largely because there’s so much space left for the singing. On that album, there are strings and beats, but it isn’t very full musically, so she has to do all the dynamics and everything. If you really want to hear what she can do, listen to It’s Oh So Quiet, from Post: she can go from zero to 60 faster than any other vehicle in terms of singing. And then to angry.
In that movie Dancer in the Dark, she’s singing as a different person and it stills sounds completely genuine. She could be an opera singer or she could be a pop singer. Dulux has a catalogue that has all the colours you can buy of paint, right? That is how Björk’s voice is. She can do anything. In our studio, there are pictures on the wall of our favourite artists. I can see Mozart, Jay-Z, Gershwin, P.J. Harvey? and Björk.
32 BONO by Billie Joe Armstrong
I would describe Bono’s singing as 50 per cent Guinness, 10 per cent cigarettes – and the rest is religion. He’s a physical singer, like the leader of a gospel choir, and he gets lost in the melodic moment. He goes to a place outside himself, especially in front of an audience, when he hits those high notes. That’s where his real power comes from – the pure, unadulterated Bono. He talks about things he believes in, whether it’s world economics or Aids relief in Africa. But the voice always comes first. That’s where his conviction lies.
He has so many influences. You hear Joe Strummer, Bob Marley, Otis Redding, Elvis Presley, even John Lennon. And he has the same range as Robert Plant. It’s amazing, the notes he has to go through in the first lines of Sunday Bloody Sunday. But it’s filtered through this Irish choirboy. The Joshua Tree shows the mastery Bono has over his voice and what he learnt from punk, New Wave and musicians such as Bob Dylan. In the quiet moments of With or Without You, you can imagine him sitting under the stars. Then, when he comes back to the chorus, it’s a hailstorm.
A lot of Bono’s free-form singing comes from the band’s rhythms and the church-bell feeling of the Edge’s playing, the way the guitar sings in that delay. Bono can glide vocally through all of that. But it’s very natural. And he’s not afraid to go beyond what he’s capable of, into something bizarre like his falsetto in Lemon. I never had the feeling he was manipulating the power of his voice to show off. They say a submarine never goes in reverse. That’s Bono, always looking for a new way of singing something. That’s one thing I learnt from him: never rest. Keep learning and be a good listener. That’s the spirit of singing – and he definitely has it.
THE 100 GREATEST SINGERS
1 Aretha Franklin 2 Ray Charles 3 Elvis Presley 4 Sam Cooke 5 John Lennon
6 Marvin Gaye 7 Bob Dylan 8 Otis Redding 9 Stevie Wonder 10 James Brown
11 Paul McCartney 12 Little Richard 13 Roy Orbison 14 Al Green 15 Robert Plant
16 Mick Jagger 17 Tina Turner 18 Freddie Mercury 19 Bob Marley 20 Smokey Robinson
21 Johnny Cash 22 Etta James 23 David Bowie 24 Van Morrison 25 Michael Jackson
26 Jackie Wilson 27 Hank Williams 28 Janis Joplin 29 Nina Simone 30 Prince
31 Howlin’ Wolf 32 Bono 33 Stevie Winwood 34 Whitney Houston 35 Dusty Springfield
36 Bruce Springsteen 37 Neil Young 38 Elton John 39 Jeff Buckley 40 Curtis Mayfield
41 Chuck Berry 42 Joni Mitchell 43 George Jones 44 Bobby “Blue” Bland 45 Kurt Cobain
46 Patsy Cline 47 Jim Morrison 48 Buddy Holly 49 Donny Hathaway 50 Bonnie Raitt
51 Gladys Knight 52 Brian Wilson 53 Muddy Waters 54 Luther Vandross 55 Paul Rodgers
56 Mavis Staples 57 Eric Burdon 58 Christina Aguilera 59 Rod Stewart 60 Björk
61 Roger Daltrey 62 Lou Reed 63 Dion 64 Axl Rose 65 David Ruffin 66 Thom Yorke
67 Jerry Lee Lewis 68 Wilson Pickett 69 Ronnie Spector 70 Gregg Allman 71 Toots Hibbert
72 John Fogerty 73 Dolly Parton 74 James Taylor 75 Iggy Pop 76 Steve Perry 77 Merle Haggard
78 Sly Stone 79 Mariah Carey 80 Frankie Valli 81 John Lee Hooker 82 Tom Waits
83 Patti Smith 84 Darlene Love 85 Sam Moore 86 Art Garfunkel 87 Don Henley
88 Willie Nelson 89 Solomon Burke 90 The Everly Brothers 91 Levon Helm
92 Morrissey 93 Annie Lennox 94 Karen Carpenter 95 Patti LaBelle 96 B.B. King
97 Joe Cocker 98 Stevie Nicks 99 Steven Tyler 100 Mary J. Blige
The 100 greatest singers of all time (Rolling Stone)
Since Elvis transformed polite pop music into rock 50-odd years ago, thousands of vocalists have entertained, moved and inspired us. To identify the best, Rolling Stone magazine polled nearly 200 musicians and pundits. Here are the results, alongside tributes from their famous fans
Aretha Franklin is a gift from God, says Mary J Blige.
There’s something about a voice that’s personal, not unlike the particular odour or shape of a given human body. Summoned through belly, hammered into form by the throat, given propulsion by bellows of lungs, teased into final form by tongue and lips, a vocal is a kind of audible kiss, a blurted confession you really can’t keep from issuing as you make your way through the material world.
The beauty of the singer’s voice touches us in a place that’s as personal as the place from which that voice has issued. If one of the weird things about singers is the ecstasy of surrender they inspire, another weird thing is the debunking response a singer can arouse once we’ve recovered our senses.
If a vocal performance that tenderises our hearts is a kind of high-wire walk, an act both breathtaking and preposterous, we can reassure ourselves that Neil Young or Gillian Welch or Joe Strummer have at least dug the foundations for the poles and strung the wire themselves. Singers reliant on existing or made-to-fit material, such as Janis Joplin, Whitney Houston or Roger Daltrey, might just be birds alighting on someone else’s wire. Listening to them, we may derive a certain thrill from wondering if they find the same meaning in the lyrics they’re putting across that the lyrics’ writer intended, or any meaning at all.
This points to what defines great singing in the rock-and-soul era: that some underlying tension exists in the space between singer and song. A bridge is being built across a void, and it’s a bridge we’re never sure the singer’s going to manage to cross. The gulf may reside between vocal texture and the actual meaning of the words, or between the singer and band, musical genre, style of production or the audience’s expectations. The simplest example comes at the moment of the style’s inception, ie, Elvis Presley: at first, listeners thought that the white guy was a black guy. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that when Ed Sullivan’s television show tossed this disjunction into everyone’s living rooms, American culture was thrilled by it but also a little deranged, in ways it hasn’t got over.
Ultimately, the nature of the vocals in post-Elvis, post-Sam Cooke, post-Ray Charles popular music is the same as the role of the instrumental soloist in jazz. If it isn’t pushing against the boundaries of its form, it isn’t doing anything at all. Etta James, Ray Davies, Mama Cass, Mark Kozelek, Levi Stubbs Jr – these might not all seem like protest singers, but they are always singing against something; whether in themselves, in the band backing them, in the world they live in or the material they’ve been given.
We judge pre-rock singing by how perfectly the lyric is served. That’s the standard Frank Sinatra exemplified. We judge popular vocals since 1956 by what the singer unearths that the song itself could never quite. It explains why voices such as Joan Baez or Emmylou Harris or Billy Joel never really seem to be singing in the contemporary idiom, no matter how much they roughen up their material or accompaniment, and why Elvis – or Dylan – is always rock, even singing Blue Moon. It also explains precisely why such virtuosic pipes as Aretha Franklin’s – or, yes, Karen Carpenter’s – function in the new tradition. No lyric written by them or anyone else could ever express what their voices needed to, and they weren’t going to wait for the instrumental solo, or for the flourish of strings, to put it across for them. They got it into their voice, and their voices got it out into the air, and from there it passed into our bodies.
HOW THE VOTES WERE CAST
Rolling Stone magazine assembled a panel of 179 judges from the ranks of musicians and singers, record company executives and music industry insiders, journalists and Rolling Stone staff. Each voter was asked to list his or her 20 favourite vocalists from the rock era, in order of their importance. Those ballots were recorded and weighted according to methodology developed by the accounting firm of Ernst & Young, which then tabulated and verified the results for Rolling Stone magazine. Jonathan Lethem
THE TOP 10
1 ARETHA FRANKLIN by Mary J. Blige
You know a force from heaven. You know something that God made. And Aretha is a gift from God. When it comes to expressing yourself through song, there is no one who can touch her. She is the reason why women want to sing.
Aretha has everything – the power, the technique. She is honest with everything she says. Everything she’s thinking or dealing with is all in the music, from Chain of Fools to Respect to her live performances. And she has total confidence; she does not waver at all. I think her gospel base brings that confidence, because in gospel they do not play around – they’re all about chops. This is no game to her.
As a child, I used to listen to Aretha’s music because my mom played Do Right Woman and Ain’t No Way every single day. I would see my mother cry when she listened to those songs, and I’d cry, too. Then I discovered her on my own with the Sparkle soundtrack. I must have played Giving Him Something He Can Feel 30 times in a row; eventually, I connected the dots to that voice my mom was listening to.
When you watch her work, you can see why Aretha is who she is. When we did the song Don’t Waste Your Time on my album Mary, she just went in there and ate that record like Pac-Man. She could be doing a church vocal run, and it would turn into some jazz-space thing; something I never encountered before. You’d say, “Where did that come from? Where did she find that note?” It’s beautiful to see, because it helps people with a lack of confidence in their ability, like myself. I look at her and think, “I need a piece of that. Whatever that is.”
2 RAY CHARLES by Billy Joel
Ray Charles had the most unique voice in popular music. He would do these improvisational things, a little laugh or a “Huh-hey!” It was as if something struck him as he was singing and he just had to react to it. He was getting a kick out of what he was doing. And his joy was infectious. Ray started out wanting to be Nat King Cole. When Nat went down low in a song, like Mona Lisa, there was a growl in there that was kind of sexy. Ray took that to a whole other level. He took the growl and turned it into singing. He took the yelp, the whoop, the grunt, the groan, and made them music.
Also, he was a piano player. The piano is a percussion instrument. You put your body into it. Ray had a lot of unique body movements I didn’t know until I saw him. Before I saw him, I heard those movements as he sang. I heard his shoulder go up a little on the left side, the way he lifted himself off the stool. Then I realised the voice I was hearing was also playing that piano.
The first Ray Charles I heard was Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. He’d had hits before that, the R&B stuff, like What’d I Say. But here is a black man giving you the whitest possible music in the blackest possible way, while all hell is breaking loose with the civil rights movement. When he sang You Don’t Know Me, I thought, “He isn’t just singing the lyrics. He’s saying, ‘You don’t know me. Get to know me.’”
Ray synthesised the blues into a language everybody could relate to. You can’t listen to Ray Charles and not say, “This is a man who felt deeply, who has lived this music.” He shows you his humanity. The spontaneity is evident. Another guy might say, “That was a mistake, we can’t leave that in.” No, Ray left it in. The mistake became the hook.
3 ELVIS PRESLEY by Robert Plant
There is a difference between people who sing and those who take that voice to another, otherworldly place; who create a euphoria within themselves. It’s transfiguration. And having met Elvis, I know he was a transformer. The first Elvis song I heard was Hound Dog. I heard this voice and it was absolutely, totally in its own place. The voice was confident, insinuating and taking no prisoners. He had those great whoops and diving moments, those sustains that swoop down to the note like a bird of prey.
I met Elvis with Zeppelin, after one of his concerts in the early Seventies. He wasn’t quite as tall as me. But he had a singer’s build. He had a good chest – that resonator. And he was driven. Anyway You Want Me is one of the most moving vocal performances I’ve ever heard. There is no touching Jailhouse Rock and the stuff recorded at the King Creole sessions. I can study the Sun sessions as a middle-aged guy looking back at a bloke’s career and go, “Wow, what a great way to start.” But I liked the modernity of the RCA stuff. I Need Your Love Tonight and A Big Hunk o’ Love were so powerful – those sessions sounded like the greatest place to be on the planet.
At that meeting, Jimmy Page joked with Elvis that we never sound-checked, but if we did, all I wanted to do was sing Elvis songs. Elvis thought that was funny and asked me, “Which songs do you sing?” I told him I liked the ones with all the moods, like that great country song Love Me – “Treat me like a fool/ Treat me mean and cruel/ But love me.” So when we were leaving, after a most illuminating and funny 90 minutes with the guy, I was walking down the corridor. He swung round the door frame, looking quite pleased with himself, and started singing that song: “Treat me like a fool?” I turned around and did Elvis right back at him. We stood there, singing to each other.
By then, because of the forces around him, it was difficult for him to stretch out with more contemporary songwriters. When he died, he was 42. I’m 18 years older than that now. But he didn’t have many fresh liaisons to draw on – his old pals weren’t going to bring him the new gospel. I know he wanted to express more. But what he did was he made it possible for me, as a singer, to become otherworldly.
4 SAM COOKE by Van Morrison
If a singer is not singing from the soul, I do not even want to listen to it – it’s not for me. Sam Cooke reached down deep with pure soul. He had the rare ability to do gospel the way it’s supposed to be – he made it real, clean, direct. Gospel drove Sam Cooke through his greatest songs, as it did for Ray Charles, who came first, and Otis Redding. He had an incomparable voice. Sam Cooke could sing anything and make it work. But when you’re talking about his strength as a singer, range is not relevant. It was his power to deliver – it was about his phrasing, the totality of his singing.
He did a lot of great songs, but Bring It On Home to Me is a favourite. It’s a song that’s written to allow you to go wherever you can with it. A Change Is Gonna Come is another song I covered; it’s a great arrangement. Not many people can play this music any more, not the way Sam Cooke did it, coming directly from the church. What can we learn from a singer like him, from listening to songs like A Change Is Gonna Come? It depends on who the singer is and what they are capable of, where their head is and how serious they are. But Sam Cooke was born to sing.
5 JOHN LENNON by Jackson Browne
There was a tremendous intimacy in everything John Lennon did, combined with a formidable intellect. That is what makes him a great singer. In Girl, on Rubber Soul, he starts in this steely, high voice: “Is there anybody going to listen to my story?” It’s so impassioned, like somebody stepping from the shadows in a room. But when he comes to the chorus, you suddenly realise: he’s talking directly to her.
He had a confidence, a certainty about what he was feeling that carried over into everything he sang. One of the things about John Lennon and the Beatles that went by a lot of people was how unusual it was for people in their class, from Liverpool, to be catapulted into the higher reaches of entertainment and society without disguising their working-class roots and voices. It was such an audacious thing to do, not to change who they were. That was the heart of John Lennon’s singing – to say who he was and where he was from.
He didn’t sing very loud. I got that sense when I was learning Oh My Love from Imagine. That song has to be done quietly, which turns out to be a feat of strength. It’s ironic – to sing high and quiet, you have to be physically strong. In I’m Only Sleeping on Revolver he sounds sleepy, like he’s half in bed as he sings. Or I’m So Tired, on the White Album – there is an irritableness to it. These songs live in you because of the remarkable facility of the singer to inhabit those moments and portray them. Imagine is a masterful performance. He inhabits that idea – our innermost longing for a world in which peace is real – when he sings it. And it is sung with fearlessness, without erring on either side – polemic or sappy. It’s wonderful to have an idea expressed so well that everybody can sing it. That’s a song he made you want to sing.
The more he developed as a writer, he was able to show his voice in various contexts. There is a thrilling aloneness in the way he sings A Day in the Life. His singing on John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band is to the bone. He willed himself to express his pain: “Mother/ You had me/ But I never had you.” It’s a crushing depiction that stays with you for ever. Double Fantasy is less tortured – there is a lot of happiness there. The singing is just beautiful, perhaps more the product of singing at home, to his son. John Lennon went through a lot to have the life he had. He gave up some things to get others. And he died before a lot of those themes could be examined.
But it was a stunning thing – he always told the truth. He felt he had the right to talk about this stuff, and that gives his voice a singular identity. It’s not the chops of a heralded singer – no one goes on about his actual technique. He went right to what he felt, what he had to say.
6 MARVIN GAYE by Alicia Keys
There’s no sound like Marvin Gaye: the way he sang so softly, almost gently – but also with so much power. That came straight from the heart. Everything in his life – everything that he thought and felt – affected his singing. The first time I was really introduced to Marvin Gaye was the What’s Going On album, and I fell in love. It was so moving to hear him talk so desperately about the state of the world, on top of all that brilliant musicality. One of my favourite things he did was to follow the strings with his voice, or double things that the instruments are doing. There’s such a simple, subtle lushness to it that adds this whole other layer to the music.
These days we have a thousand tracks, and you can do different vocals on every track. But back then you really had to innovate, like the way Marvin answered himself in songs, or all that really distant backing work, where his voice is all the way in the back and echoing. It’s haunting; he delivered every single song with such clarity that it gave me chills. The live version of Distant Lover has to be one of the most incredible performances ever captured on tape. You can feel his confidence, his yearning – you can imagine his movements. The entire audience is hanging on his every word; he’s teasing them the whole time. That’s what makes Marvin Gaye immortal: the emotion that he evokes.
7 BOB DYLAN by Bono
I first heard Bob Dylan’s voice in the dark, when I was 13 years old, on my friend’s record player. It was his greatest-hits album, the first one. The voice was at once modern, in all the things it was railing against, and very ancient. It felt strangely familiar to an Irishman. We thought America was full of superheroes, but it was a much humbler people in these songs – farmers, people who have had great injustices done to them. The really unusual thing about Bob Dylan was that, for a moment in the Sixties, he felt like the future. He was the voice of a generation, raised against the generation that came before. Then he became the voice of all the generations, the voices in the ground – these ghosts from the Thirties and the Dust Bowl, the romance of Gershwin and the music hall. For me, the pictures of him in his polka-dot shirt, the Afro and pointy shoes – that was a brief flash of lightning. His voice is usually put to the service of more ancient characters.
Here are some of the adjectives I have found myself using to describe that voice: howling, seducing, raging, imploring, begging, hectoring, confessing, keening, wailing, soothing, conversational, crooning. It is a voice like smoke, from cigar to incense, where it’s full of wonder and worship. There is a voice for every Dylan you can meet, and the reason I’m never bored with Bob Dylan is because there are so many of them, all centred on the idea of pilgrimage. People forget that Bob Dylan had to warm up for Dr Martin Luther King before he made his great “I have a dream” speech – the preacher preceded by the pilgrim.
Dylan did with singing what Brando did with acting. He busted through the artifice to get to the art. Both of them tore down the prissy rules laid down by the schoolmarms of their craft, broke through the fourth wall, got in the audience’s face and said, “I dare you to think I’m kidding.”
8 OTIS REDDING by Booker T. Jones
The first time I saw Otis, I had no idea who he was. It was on the sidewalk at 926 East McLemore Avenue in Memphis, which was Stax Records. This guy was unloading equipment and suitcases from a station wagon, taking it into the studio. He was a driver for the singer Johnny Jenkins. I didn’t see him much the rest of the day until later, when he asked for his audition. He sang These Arms of Mine.
It was in B-flat. It didn’t seem like an audition at all. It was a performance. It wasn’t the size of his voice – we knew lots of people with vocal powers like that. It was the intent with which he sang. He was all emotion. It was like, “This guy is definitely not singing for the money.” I don’t think he ever did.
Range was not a factor in his singing. His range was somewhat limited. He had no really low notes and no really high notes. But Otis would do anything that implied emotion, and that’s where his physicality came in, because he was such a strong, powerful man. Backstage, he would be like a prizefighter waiting to get out there. Playing Respect live with him was just energy and relentless joy.
Without singing, Otis was more distracted, not sure of himself. He couldn’t make the same movements in the studio when he sang. He was more restricted. You got the impression, though. He would do that thing where he stomped the left foot, then the right. And we all played with more intensity around him. He had that magnetism – “I’m a man!” – and he knew it, too.
These Arms of Mine is still Otis’s signature song for me. It is so simple in its beauty and message. Here is a young man singing to a girl: “If you would even consider being with me, how happy I would be.” That’s such a basic emotion. That’s how he sang it, and that’s what got him over.
9 STEVIE WONDER by Cee-Lo
To me, Stevie Wonder’s voice always sounds like tears of joy – like he’s right on the verge of crying, but it’s out of glee and peace, as opposed to the pain of someone like a Sly Stone.
There’s a richness to his voice, a clarity to all of its inflections. That vibrato is so impactful and piercing, but he never loses that underlying straightforward singing voice. His lack of sight must heighten his other senses, his ability to imagine and feel. It makes his music very visual, very graphic.
The first time I remember hearing Stevie Wonder was when I heard him singing Fingertips in the movie Cooley High. I was in awe of this child’s ability to see himself so clearly and be so sure of himself so young. Then I had to go back and discover Stevie Wonder as a whole. My uncle had an album collection, so I had seen Talking Book and Innervisions, but I knew the covers before I knew the music. I got turned on to his amazing performances such as Superwoman, I Ain’t Gonna Stand for It and, of course, Ribbon in the Sky – that song is so simple, but it’s so significant. His voice has so much variation and such diversity.
His confidence and his sense of self are just supernatural. Stevie Wonder knows exactly who he is, what role and responsibility he’s been given. But he revels in being chosen, singled out, and that’s what makes him who he is. He’s like a miracle.
10 JAMES BROWN by Iggy Pop
For me, James Brown was never just the voice. It was the whole package. But the impact of that voice gave me hope, because it was a simple presentation and didn’t trade on range. And there was that scream. It was like an inner voice. It sounded like an assertion of rights of primitive man. He used to describe his dancing as “African nerve control”. He had a point. He was a terrific editor. The one that flipped me out – I still remember being in the car, hearing it – is I Can’t Stand It. He was down to f*** the chorus, f*** the melody. This is barely a riff. But he pushes the group along like the coxswain on a Roman galley: Stroke,motherf*****, uh!
He always has an edge in his ballads where he lets you know it’s real. There’s a lesser-known one called Mama’s Dead. It just kills me. At the end, after he’s sung all these heavy things, he just says, “Everybody got a mother, and you know what I’m talkin’ about.” Or in the chorus of It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World – a lesser artist would say, “It wouldn’t mean nothin’ without a woman.” Or “without a girl”. But they wouldn’t say both. And it’s not just a lyric. He is singing something primitive and basic. He tells you how society runs. Man makes this, this is how money works. Maybe that comes from being somebody who didn’t have many things when he started out. The part in his autobiography that always gets me is when he lived with his dad, tapping the pine trees for resin. You’re down to real poverty.
The big thing I got from him was, don’t just stand there and look at your shoe. F*** that. It had to be like something’s going on here. He always sounds like he’s breaking loose. Once you’ve made the decision to go out in front of people and start moving around, it frees up so many things. You’re now creating movement in a society that’s based on order. And within yourself, you feel different. That motion makes you make decisions as a vocalist, decisions that free you from the stilted stuff.
In those situations, music has a cathartic power, and the guys who do it, they know that. That’s why James Brown could call himself Soul Brother Number One – and nobody ever said he was bragging.
And the best of all the rest...
17 TINA TURNER
“I’ll never forget the first time I saw [Tina] perform,” says Beyoncé. “I never in my life saw a woman so powerful, so fearless.” Turner started touring with the Ike and Tina Turner Revue almost half a century ago; her breakthrough was their blazing 1971 cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Proud Mary, which included the declaration that she never does anything “nice and easy”. “She was so direct, so raw,” says John Fogerty, who wrote the song. Age has only deepened the ache and grit in her powerhouse cries and moans during her long career as a solo artist. Melissa Etheridge says, “She can squeeze passion from any line.”
16 MICK JAGGER by Lenny Kravitz
I sometimes talk to people who sing perfectly in a technical sense who don’t understand Mick Jagger. But what he does is so complex: his sense of pitch and melody is really sophisticated. His vocals are stunning, flawless in their own kind of perfection. There are certain songs where he just becomes a different person. Take Angie: I’ve never heard that tone from him since, and it wasn’t there before. And I love when he sings falsetto, like on Emotional Rescue or Fool to Cry. I like him best when he’s singing super-raw. When I co-produced God Gave Me Everything, he did what he thought would be a scratch vocal. He barely knew the lyric – he was reading off a piece of paper. There were no stops, just one take. Bam! It ended up being the vocal we used on the record.
Mick is a disciplined artist, completely dedicated to his craft. His voice has changed somewhat and has a different texture, but it’s stronger now. One time the Stones were on tour, and during a two-week break Mick and I went on vacation in the Bahamas. In the evening he would go to the bottom floor of the place where we were staying and put on a Rolling Stones sound-check tape – just the band playing songs without him singing. He would stay down there, dancing and singing to keep himself in shape. Your voice is like a muscle. If you’re on the road and you stop for two weeks and then go back to do a show, you’re going to get hoarse. So he was down there every night practising. As a result, at 65 years of age, he’s stronger than ever.
28 JANIS JOPLIN by Melissa Etheridge
“She was shaking that shake that she did, and was screaming. I’d never seen anything like it,” says Melissa Etheridge of seeing Janis Joplin on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1969. Joplin’s gravelly rasp, over the psychedelic blues of Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the rough-hewn country soul on her later solo albums, represented a different approach for female vocalists: wild and uninhibited yet focused and deliberate. Her performances were more about passionate abandon than perfect pitch. “She would just kinda sing and scream and cry,” says Etheridge, “and she’d sound like an old black woman – which is what she was trying to sound like.”
60 BJÖRK by Chris Martin
When you land in Iceland, you feel like you’re somewhere a bit magical. Maybe it’s the volcanic activity, maybe it’s the dried fish, but something’s going on: everyone seems to be extraordinarily beautiful, and everyone appears to be able to sing. Their singers are so far ahead of everyone else – especially Björk. Her voice is so specific and such a new colour. Now that she’s been around for 20 years, everyone forgets quite how extraordinary she is. She could be singing the theme from Sesame Street, and it would sound completely different to how anyone else would do it, and completely magical.
She first crossed my radar on Big Time Sensuality, from that video where she’s on the back of a flatbed truck. I really got into her on Homogenic, largely because there’s so much space left for the singing. On that album, there are strings and beats, but it isn’t very full musically, so she has to do all the dynamics and everything. If you really want to hear what she can do, listen to It’s Oh So Quiet, from Post: she can go from zero to 60 faster than any other vehicle in terms of singing. And then to angry.
In that movie Dancer in the Dark, she’s singing as a different person and it stills sounds completely genuine. She could be an opera singer or she could be a pop singer. Dulux has a catalogue that has all the colours you can buy of paint, right? That is how Björk’s voice is. She can do anything. In our studio, there are pictures on the wall of our favourite artists. I can see Mozart, Jay-Z, Gershwin, P.J. Harvey? and Björk.
32 BONO by Billie Joe Armstrong
I would describe Bono’s singing as 50 per cent Guinness, 10 per cent cigarettes – and the rest is religion. He’s a physical singer, like the leader of a gospel choir, and he gets lost in the melodic moment. He goes to a place outside himself, especially in front of an audience, when he hits those high notes. That’s where his real power comes from – the pure, unadulterated Bono. He talks about things he believes in, whether it’s world economics or Aids relief in Africa. But the voice always comes first. That’s where his conviction lies.
He has so many influences. You hear Joe Strummer, Bob Marley, Otis Redding, Elvis Presley, even John Lennon. And he has the same range as Robert Plant. It’s amazing, the notes he has to go through in the first lines of Sunday Bloody Sunday. But it’s filtered through this Irish choirboy. The Joshua Tree shows the mastery Bono has over his voice and what he learnt from punk, New Wave and musicians such as Bob Dylan. In the quiet moments of With or Without You, you can imagine him sitting under the stars. Then, when he comes back to the chorus, it’s a hailstorm.
A lot of Bono’s free-form singing comes from the band’s rhythms and the church-bell feeling of the Edge’s playing, the way the guitar sings in that delay. Bono can glide vocally through all of that. But it’s very natural. And he’s not afraid to go beyond what he’s capable of, into something bizarre like his falsetto in Lemon. I never had the feeling he was manipulating the power of his voice to show off. They say a submarine never goes in reverse. That’s Bono, always looking for a new way of singing something. That’s one thing I learnt from him: never rest. Keep learning and be a good listener. That’s the spirit of singing – and he definitely has it.
THE 100 GREATEST SINGERS
1 Aretha Franklin 2 Ray Charles 3 Elvis Presley 4 Sam Cooke 5 John Lennon
6 Marvin Gaye 7 Bob Dylan 8 Otis Redding 9 Stevie Wonder 10 James Brown
11 Paul McCartney 12 Little Richard 13 Roy Orbison 14 Al Green 15 Robert Plant
16 Mick Jagger 17 Tina Turner 18 Freddie Mercury 19 Bob Marley 20 Smokey Robinson
21 Johnny Cash 22 Etta James 23 David Bowie 24 Van Morrison 25 Michael Jackson
26 Jackie Wilson 27 Hank Williams 28 Janis Joplin 29 Nina Simone 30 Prince
31 Howlin’ Wolf 32 Bono 33 Stevie Winwood 34 Whitney Houston 35 Dusty Springfield
36 Bruce Springsteen 37 Neil Young 38 Elton John 39 Jeff Buckley 40 Curtis Mayfield
41 Chuck Berry 42 Joni Mitchell 43 George Jones 44 Bobby “Blue” Bland 45 Kurt Cobain
46 Patsy Cline 47 Jim Morrison 48 Buddy Holly 49 Donny Hathaway 50 Bonnie Raitt
51 Gladys Knight 52 Brian Wilson 53 Muddy Waters 54 Luther Vandross 55 Paul Rodgers
56 Mavis Staples 57 Eric Burdon 58 Christina Aguilera 59 Rod Stewart 60 Björk
61 Roger Daltrey 62 Lou Reed 63 Dion 64 Axl Rose 65 David Ruffin 66 Thom Yorke
67 Jerry Lee Lewis 68 Wilson Pickett 69 Ronnie Spector 70 Gregg Allman 71 Toots Hibbert
72 John Fogerty 73 Dolly Parton 74 James Taylor 75 Iggy Pop 76 Steve Perry 77 Merle Haggard
78 Sly Stone 79 Mariah Carey 80 Frankie Valli 81 John Lee Hooker 82 Tom Waits
83 Patti Smith 84 Darlene Love 85 Sam Moore 86 Art Garfunkel 87 Don Henley
88 Willie Nelson 89 Solomon Burke 90 The Everly Brothers 91 Levon Helm
92 Morrissey 93 Annie Lennox 94 Karen Carpenter 95 Patti LaBelle 96 B.B. King
97 Joe Cocker 98 Stevie Nicks 99 Steven Tyler 100 Mary J. Blige
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