The 200 Greatest Singers of All Time

Elton John’s over-the-top pop-rock gets an added jolt from his voice, which can highlight the impish glee or profound emotion in his songwriting partner Bernie Taupin’s lyrics. John’s nonpiano instrument has evolved over the years; in 1987, he had surgery to remove what he said to Billboard were “nine cancerous … whatever it was on my vocal cords,” deepening his range and modulating the falsetto that gave emotional oomph to ‘70s hits like “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.” But, as he noted in that 2004 interview, that surgery gave his voice added resonance, and his performances of old chestnuts on his current farewell tour still pack an emotional wallop. —M.J.     

A high tenor seemingly overcome with emotion, conveyed with a vocal arsenal full of dramatic swoops, gulps, growls, and falsetto leaps, Clyde McPhatter was a thrill a minute, a shot in the arm for R&B right at the dawn of rock & roll, and one of the most influential singers of the Fifties — you can draw the line from Frankie Lymon to Michael Jackson to Justin Timberlake. He led two of the best groups of the decade, joining the Dominoes and then founding the Drifters (Ben E. King came later). His lascivious version, with the latter, of “White Christmas” is now a deserved holiday classic. —M.M.

Influenced by James Brown’s funk declamations, the earthy equanimity of folk and blues, and the yearning hunger in rock’s search for mass connection, Bob Marley invented a down-to-earth yet heraldic idiom that reflected the struggles and aspirations of tens of millions of people throughout the world. His voice was lovably ragged even on smooth tracks like “Could You Be Loved,” but his command of the dramatic octave leap that signifies our shared search for a better tomorrow had few peers. And it says something about the communal gravity of his voice that one of his most deeply beloved recorded moments — the “No Woman No Cry” captured at London’s Lyceum Theatre in July 1975 — was created live out of thin air, bountiful warts and all. —J.D.

Usher was barely out of high school in 1997 when he released his breakthrough album My Way, which went six-times platinum and familiarized fans with his slick, sultry delivery. But while it could have been easy to pigeonhole him as just another smooth R&B heartthrob, each subsequent chapter of his career revealed new possibilities in his voice: He perfected his signature falsetto, deployed at just the right moments to boost the vulnerability in his confessional ballads; he matched his impeccable timing and phrasing to upbeat hits that climbed up the charts that proved his showmanship. Not only was he a standout performer of the 2000s, he remains one of music’s most agile singers two decades later. —J.L.

Sure, Chuck Berry was the most important rock lyricist before (and besides) Bob Dylan, but it isn’t just the words that captivate — it’s the voice singing them. He was sly like the uncle who offers you your first illicit sip or toot, wise like the teacher who sets you on your path, full of brassy fun — and since he wrote the words, he made sure you understood every single one. Those syllables ride the driving beat as hard as his guitar riffs: Berry’s knowing phrasing gave short stories like “You Never Can Tell” a deeper resonance. And then there’s “Memphis, Tennessee,” where he outright breaks your heart. —M.M.

Vicente Fernández’s unmistakable tenor, intense vibrato, and his hard-to-miss charro outfits earned him the title “The Idol of Mexico.” His classics like the boisterous “El Rey,” romantic “Hermoso Cariño,” and his heartbroken “Volver, Volver” have long served as the soundtrack of Mexico’s rich ranchera culture. His artistic peak is 1989’s “Por tu Maldito Amor,” from the film he starred in of the same name, perfectly encapsulated the breadth of Fernández’s ability to capture intense, tear-filled drama. Starting his career in the Seventies, the Jalisco-born singer followed in the footsteps of ranchera greats like Jorge Negrete, Pedro Infante, and Javier Solis who came before him, as he carried a traditional genre to new heights and cemented himself as the greatest ranchera singer of all time. His music continues to stand the test of time today and has drawn comparisons to Frank Sinatra. —T.M.

Reggae pioneer Toots Hibbert possessed a rough-edged, fierce voice that gave fire to the incarceration chronicle “54-46 That’s My Number” and added a slyly endearing wink to the wedding-jitters chronicle “Sweet and Dandy.” The Toots and the Maytals leader came to music through religion: “My voice was developed going to church with my family,” he told Uncut in 2020. “I love singing; singing was what I thought I should do because it was born in me and I grew into it, straight from the church.” Over the years, it evolved further, with Hibbert taking cues from gospel and soul, helping him fulfill the promise he laid out in the title track to his classic 1973 album Funky Kingston: “I want you to believe every word I say/ I want you to believe every thing I do.” —M.J.

There are so many layers to the Stevie Nicks mythology at this point that it can be easy to gloss over the precious stone at the center of it all: her gorgeous smoky quartz of a voice, which has always lent her crystal visions an unnerving power. Her disciples are legion, from Harry Styles to Florence Welch, but in particular, any female singer who has flaunted a raspy vocal style — Lorde, Sheryl Crow, Courtney Love — owes her a massive debt. “I think she has probably the sexiest voice of anyone that I can think of,” Love once said. It’s a voice that can make a Fleetwood Mac classic like “Gold Dust Woman” or “Sara” feel more like a spell than a song, or — in the case of immortal breakup anthems “Dreams,” “Silver Springs,” and “Wild Heart” — like an irresistible hex. —H.S.

Anita Baker was a devotee of gospel legend Mahalia Jackson and jazz belter Sarah Vaughan, and her full-throated performances — which have the fire of gospel and the improvisational nature of jazz — were in part a tribute to those singers’ artistry. “Although I wouldn’t presume to try to carry the torch, I can still hold it up,” Baker told The New York Times in 1986. Baker was being modest, although her singing was anything but; the vamping that closes out her massive 1986 ballad “Sweet Love” is just one example of how she built on her idols’ legacies, then combined them with her considerable talent and keen knowledge of R&B’s evolving ideals, to cement her place in soul music’s pantheon. —M.J.  

Watching archival performances of the late Pakistani vocal master Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan — an icon in the realm of Qawwali, a type of Sufi devotional song, whose family’s musical legacy stretched back hundreds of years — it’s easy to lose track of time, and to hear how his music easily reached global audiences in the Eighties when he began performing abroad and recording for Peter Gabriel’s Real World label. His many famous fans included Madonna, Eddie Vedder (who duetted with him on the Dead Man Walking soundtrack), and Jeff Buckley (who called the singer “my Elvis” and studied Urdu in order to properly cover him). “When I sing, I sing with the depth of my heart,” Khan told an interviewer in 1996, the year before his death at age 48. —H.S.

In 1971, Gal Costa recorded “Sua Estupidez,” a sappy balada by pop crooner Roberto Carlos, and turned it into a heart-wrenching declaration of beauty and regret. Such was the transformative power of her voice. Like a luminous queen Midas, the diva from Bahia turned everything she touched into gold: wide-eyed tropicália (“Baby,” a late ‘60s Brazilian classic), sexy samba-rock (“Flor de Maracujá”), exuberant carnival frevo (“Festa Do Interior”), and funkified bossa (her 1979 reading of the standard “Estrada do Sol” is so lush and mystical, it borders on the surreal). The most transcendent female vocalist of the post-bossa era, she continued making music until her death at 77. —E.L.

According to Quintanilla family lore, Selena was about six years old when she wandered into a guitar lesson her father was leading and showed off her natural, almost uncanny ability to sing. “Her timing, her pitch were perfect,” her father said in a 1995 interview. As she grew older, becoming a cross-cultural megastar with the family band Selena y Los Dinos, her husky vibrato and impressive belting power shaped cumbia hits that defined generations of Tejano music. Though her life was sadly cut short, her music hasn’t lost any staying power: She continues to top the charts decades after her death, and a posthumous album recently featured new, digitally created songs for fans who wished they could have heard more from her. —J.L.

Jimmie Rodgers wasn’t an overpowering singer but an amazingly sly one — even through the crackle of aged shellac, he comes on like the sharpest, hippest guy in the room. That didn’t mean there wasn’t feeling there: His Blue Yodel series, the records that made him a legend, are imbued with the high-lonesome sound that was his trademark. But even then, Rodgers seemed to be holding back a bit — and that lack of histrionics makes his piercing yodels and easy-rolling rhythms hit even harder. When he boasted about his prowess in bed, his lack of overt effect made you believe it. —M.M.

“I made the choices of who sung lead, and my opinion was always that Diana had the magic,” Berry Gordy said of Motown’s biggest act, the Supremes. And yes, Berry and Miss Ross were a clandestine but real item. Nonetheless, his commercial instincts were on the nose. Diana Ross’ sheer vivacity, not to mention her creamy timbre and flirty insouciance, added up not only to star quality but also a unique vocal style. She can seem like she’s talking as much as she’s singing, adding an everygirl quality to her fashionista façade and paving the way for future divas like Janet Jackson. —M.M.

Jackson’s best vocal moments thrived in their ability to transcend styles and transform expectations — the way the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” turns James Brown into bubblegum, the exuberance mixed with bite of “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” the way “Human Nature” dreams of connection while shivering in isolation. What we now know about his life makes his music harder to enjoy, and it’s been argued that as his world darkened his voice devolved into a parodic arsenal of tics. But even toward the end, given the right musical setting (such as the light-touch high points on 2001’s Invincible), his ability to sink into a song while also seeming to float above it remained peerless. —J.D.

In the Fifties, while on tour with Elvis Presley, country great June Carter met her future husband because, she said, “Elvis had been raving about what a great singer Johnny Cash was.” Indeed, for many, Cash’s mile-wide, wondrously fluid baritone is the sound of country music at its best. His ruggedness and his good humor were always in one another’s pocket — “One Piece at a Time,” from 1976, is a model for how to make a silly song even funnier by playing it lifelike. And his outlaw side — from “Folsom Prison Blues” in 1955 to “Hurt” in 2002 — was usually rueful and always convincing. —M.M.

The crystalline, eternally girlish voice of “the Melody Queen” is a cornerstone of Indian pop music, with a global influence spread via Bollywood films, whose golden era she defined. Lata was the empress of playback singers, the vocal magicians who perform songs for actors to lip-sync in lavish movie musicals, recording over 7,000 such songs, by some estimates. Even Asha Bhosle, her younger sister and only true peer among playbackers, considered “Lata Didi” her “favorite singer” — and if Bhosle was more versatile and prolific, her elder sister remained the gold standard for the piercing brilliance of her tone. The Lata Mangeshkar songbook has informed songs far beyond Bollywood, from Britney Spears’ “Toxic” (which sampled the 1981 Lata duet “Tere Mere Beech Mein”) to electronic jams by Madlib and Four Tet (who made a section of Lata’s exquisite “Main Teri Chhoti Bahna Hoon” the centerpiece of his 2015 “Morning Side”). —W.H.

Amy Winehouse’s rich and smoky tone was at both nostalgic and timeless. In both her image and music, the British star paid tribute to Sixties girl groups like the Ronettes, but her own taste was too molded by Nineties and early aughts hip-hop to be glued to the past. The two albums she released in her too-short lifetime were a sublime fusion of classic soul with modern R&B, with that gorgeously deep and heartbreaking tone of hers serpentining through inescapable inner turmoil, romantic chaos, damp London streets, and decades of music history to shape one of pop’s all-time heaviest and unique voices. —B.S.

Steve Perry channeled his early love of Sam Cooke and the Drifters into a smoky yet soaring belt that became the gold standard of arena-rock theatrics. Wherever you stand on the shameless melodrama that’s made Journey an eternal staple of the FM dial, it’s impossible to deny the majesty of Perry’s delivery on rockers like “Don’t Stop Believin’” and “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart),” or the tenderness he brings to ballads like “Open Arms” and “Faithfully.” Perry hasn’t sung with Journey since 1991, or played a proper show in close to 30 years, but fans still keep their lighters raised for the man known as “The Voice.” —H.S.

One of the most powerful cultural movements to emerge from Latin America, bossa nova relied on three founding architects: Antônio Carlos Jobim was the composer, Vinicius de Moraes the lyricist, and João Gilberto its understated singer and guitarist. A master of cosmopolitan subtlety, the Bahia native murmured and whispered with an ease that made every song feel like a casual gathering of friends. This style — its poetry and warmth — was a perfect match for the bossa narratives about contemplating life at Copacabana beach. Gilberto’s 1959 debut album set the tone for the ensuing revolution, and the jazzy 1964 classic Getz/Gilberto summed up its energy with “Garota de Ipanema,” which he performed alongside the broken English of his lilting wife Astrud. —E.L.

Whether it’s on Temple of the Dog’s gutting eulogy “Say Hello 2 Heaven” or Soundgarden’s brutal, beautiful “Burden in My Hand,” Cornell is the Seattle Sound in one singular voice. His nearly four-octave range hit the scene like a gut punch and left a deep mark, festering with emotion and power as it careened from a raw baritone to a wailing falsetto — sometimes within the same song. “I’ve been pretty lucky in that my voice has been a pretty reliable instrument,” he told Rolling Stone in 2015. “All it ever really required of me was just to figure out how to manipulate it in the best way to get what I want out of it.” —A.M.

“I’m an untrained, unschooled harmony singer,” Harris once said. But the singer-songwriter is arguably the greatest American harmony vocalist of the past half-century, beginning with her early Seventies work with Gram Parsons (listen to her use of vibrato in  “Love Hurts”). In the 50 years since, she’s added her own angelic counter-harmony lines to hundreds of records by everyone from Bright Eyes to Willie Nelson, while shining as a lead vocalist on her own records. It’s the way she uses breathing and space on the country classic “Together Again,” or the way her phrasing accents the desolate heartbreak of “I Still Miss Someone,” or the way she deploys range and falsetto to further the lonely narrative of “Orphan Girl.” —J.B. 

“Janis Joplin sings the blues as hard as any Black person,” B.B. King once said. Apart from time as a coffeehouse folkie with a taste for Ma Rainey, Joplin’s career as one of the great American rock stars was from June 4, 1966, when she joined Big Brother and the Holding Company, until her death on October 4, 1970, exactly 52 months. In less than five years, she became a legend (especially onstage, where she remains one of the great rock frontpersons) for an absolute bazooka of a voice that did everything a blues, rock, or soul singer’s voice should do: embody the song, and transmit every ounce of vulnerability or pain or rage the singer has. —J.G.  

As a singer no less than a bandleader, Bruce Springsteen’s great gift is for dynamics. Whisper-to-a-scream is a big part of what he does — just listen to the second verse of “Born to Run,” which starts out like Roy Orbison chewing gum and then turns into Wilson Pickett on a motorcycle. It’s easy to goof on the gruff guy belting out his verse of “We Are the World,” but Springsteen’s emotional commitment is always on the money: honestly desperate on “The River,” starkly scary on “State Trooper,” utterly jubilant on “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight),” a sad, horny wreck on “I’m on Fire.” —M.M.

Few Sixties R&B stars had as propulsive a shout as Wilson Pickett — a late-night lover and a prime progenitor of funk. Singing gospel as a young man, Pickett said, “I got the sound that I would use as the basis for my whole style of vocalizing. I used that wild, abandoned style of singing and put it into the context of soul. … Singing in church has given me a certain feeling for music.” That rough testifying gave Pickett’s music its drive: Few soul singers had his unyielding rhythmic acuity, and he could sound peacock-proud without seeming merely arrogant. —M.M.

Thick as molasses or, per the title of his signature song, “Brown Sugar,” Michael Eugene Archer has one of the most ingratiating voices in R&B — instantly classic, almost out of time. In fact, it was D’Angelo who necessitated the term “neo-soul,” coined by Motown executive Kedar Massenburg to market him. Few modern singers so freely display their church roots — but rather than a showboat, his phrasing is often understated, building patiently to torrid screams that could make the stoutest church lady feel positively sinful. And with arrangements that mirror and embellish his vocal melodies, D’Angelo’s subtle phrasing makes his music deeply durable, just like his gorgeous natural instrument. —M.M.

A flamboyant belter whose fearlessness shone through in her ability to change keys and leap octaves, Patti LaBelle’s arresting voice gave pop music a jolt in both her solo work and as a member of the vocal group LaBelle. “I’m fabulous,” LaBelle asserted in a 2008 interview. “You can’t make me feel less than I am, because whenever I get the microphone I’m gonna show you who I am.” She wasn’t lying: The saucy “Lady Marmalade” wouldn’t have hit as hard without LaBelle’s ad-libs and down-and-dirty grinding, while the Michael McDonald duet “On My Own” worked so well because of the way her piercing soprano countered her partner’s raspy baritone. —M.J.

Salsa was never the same after Puerto Rican singer Héctor Lavoe left his native Ponce and moved to New York in 1963 at age 16. Blessed with a wicked sense of humor and a chocolaty voice able to manipulate at will the clave dynamics that make Afro-Caribbean music swing with reckless abandon, Lavoe was salsa’s own rock star — tragic, charismatic, suicidal. His tenure with the orchestra of virtuoso trombonist and producer Willie Colón took New York by storm with the urgency of hits “Che Che Colé” and “La Murga.” Going solo in the mid-‘70s, he turned progressive on majestic orchestral epics like “El Cantante” — a Rubén Blades composition that perfectly captures Lavoe’s mercurial persona. He died in 1993 at age 46.–E.L.

Smoky and ready with a laugh at the world, be it garrulous or rueful, Muddy Waters defined electric blues singing — though he himself would insist, “I am a country blues singer.” But whether higher and freer on acoustic when Alan Lomax recorded him in the Forties, or in the lower-down and more wryly knowing style his Fifties sessions for Chess Records augured, Waters sang with warmth, solidity, and a hint of power held in reserve. He could shout, but it was the way he’d build to it, from “Hoochie Coochie Man” to his walloping 1977 overhaul of “Mannish Boy,” where the thrill truly lay. —M.M.

Elvis Presley called him “the greatest singer in the world,” and he declined to cover his work out of respect. Dolly Parton said, “I have never been more moved by a voice.” Kris Kristofferson concurred: “One of the most beautiful voices in the history of recorded music.” On “Only the Lonely,” “Crying,” and “In Dreams,” Orbison used his control, three-octave range, and bone-deep sadness to transmit almost gothic melodrama. But check out the still-astounding Traveling Wilburys song “Not Alone Any More,” recorded and released less than two months before Orbison’s death in 1988 to hear exactly why it was impossible not to use the word “operatic” when describing Orbison’s overwhelming sound. —J.G. 

Ronnie Spector and her fellow Ronettes were scheduled to sing background for a Phil Spector session. “We came into the studio that evening, and he heard my voice,” she recalled in 1979. “He said, ‘That’s it.’” Soon the Ronettes were Spector’s prize clients — their masterpiece, and his, was 1963’s “Be My Baby,” with the most yearning vocal in all of rock. Then Phil married Ronnie and essentially locked her away from the world. After she left him, her recording career was erratic, but her voice shone in any setting, from an E Street Band-backed tear through Billy Joel’s “Say Goodbye to Hollywood” to her elegiac, Joey Ramone-assisted version of Johnny Thunders’ “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory.” —M.M.

The earliest recordings of Youssou N’Dour, from the late Seventies with his band Étoile de Dakar — available on Vol. 1: Absa Gueye — are still startling, both for the surging Senegalese funk grooves and for N’Dour’s sky-high tenor, as instantly commanding as the young Michael Jackson. And N’Dour kept maturing as a singer: His basic thrill-a-minute style has modulated to a more human scale over the years, but he can call it forth with ease. On 2021’s Mbalax, N’Dour reinterpreted his own high-energy past with a tempered but still powerful approach, coming full circle. —M.M.

An alto whose range spans three octaves, Rihanna isn’t just one of the biggest pop singers around: She’s one of the biggest voices, period. Her low notes are particularly resonant — she dips into them to underline a phrase, or to add a hint of doubt to a line. But her keening top notes, which have grown more billowing with time, are still the main draw: Half of what made “Umbrella” indelible is her signature, nasal “ella-ella-ay-ay-ay”s. “Rihanna’s voice is just delicious for your ear,” Chris Martin of Coldplay declared. “She is the Frank Sinatra of our generation. She can turn anything into gold with that voice.” —M.M.

Dennis Brown was a child star — his first hit, 1969’s “No Man Is an Island,” came at age nine — who matured into homegrown superstar. With a voice as tough-yet-velvety as suede, he was one of Jamaica’s smoothest love men ever, not to mention a dispense of homespun wisdom on the immortal 1981 hit “Sitting and Watching.” Sadly, Brown died at 42. Yet, throughout his career, his soulfulness was unimpeachable — no less an authority than Bob Marley once declared Brown his favorite reggae singer. —M.M.

Take it from Bruce Springsteen: “‘I Wish It Would Rain,’ you’ve gotta be nuts to try and sing that song after David Ruffin sang it,” he told Rolling Stone’s Andy Greene this year with a laugh after he made the, yes, moderately hubristic decision to cover that 1967 Temptations classic. Bruce is just one of many great singers in awe of Ruffin’s distinctive sandpaper tone, a vocal texture that countless soul and rock musicians have envied in the peak Motown years and afterward. On hits like “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” “Beauty Is Only Skin Deep,” and “My Girl,” Ruffin was the earthbound anchor for the Temptations’ heavenly harmonies, the guy whose flawed humanity enriched their greatest love songs. “I know you wanna leave me,” he sang, with a singular rasp that guaranteed we never would. —S.V.L.

Minnie Riperton is the definition of a songbird. There’s no better way to describe her fluttering, soaring voice, and the way she famously ascended five octaves into a honeyed whistle register on Seventies soft-soul classics like “Loving You” and “Inside My Love.” But Riperton also imbued her performances with earthy heft, and her shifts between corporeal and ethereal tones made for stunning results. Then there’s “Les Fleurs,” where her voice is multitracked by famed producer Charles Stepney, allowing her to sing gallantly in choral formation as her falsetto floats in the background. Riperton’s sophisticated vocal techniques have inspired many artists, notably another five-octave soul singer, Mariah Carey. Still, she remains in a class of her own. —M.R.

At one time around the turn of the century, it sounded as if dozens of vocalists tried to mimic the uncanny style of Björk Guðmundsdóttir. But it’s not easy to do. The Icelandic iconoclast is known for accelerating from a heavily accented tone that closely resembles a speaking voice to a cathartic upper range that feels like screams of passion and insight. She stretches and contorts her voice as if she’s manipulating time and the beat. Her highly conceptual catalog, a series of albums encompassing electronic music, trip-hop, cabaret jazz, and art rock spread across five decades and counting, only enhances the feeling of hearing a rare, unusual thing evolve and grow. —M.R.

As much flak as Robert Plant rightly gets for his liberal borrowings from blues lyrics, his actual vocal style, informed early on by sources such as Skip James and Blind Lemon Jefferson, quickly evolved into something unique. Take “Immigrant Song,” with its screechy wailing and weirdly languid croon, or the dreamy warble he adopts in “Kashmir.” As over the top as his Led Zeppelin work could get, some of Plant’s greatest performances came when he aimed for serenity rather than savagery (see: “Going to California,” “The Rain Song,” “Ten Years Gone”). It’s almost as if he always knew he’d reinvent himself as a mystical folkie — and one reason why his later collaborations with Alison Krauss and musicians from Mali and Morocco are some of the most credible late-career vocal work by an ex-arena rocker. —H.S.

The teen idol turned soul-pop master had a supple, yet strong tenor that could handle nearly anything thrown his way — the anguish of “Careless Whisper,” the motivational gospel-pop of “Freedom! ’90,” the steely-eyed protest of “Praying for Time,” the genre-spanning covers he tossed into his live sets. His crowning achievement came at the 1992 Freddie Mercury tribute concert in London, when he took on the vocal workout “Somebody to Love” — and thanks to his prowess and charisma, he had all of Wembley Stadium responding as if he were the second coming of the Queen frontman. Even Brian May agreed: “There’s a certain note in his voice when he did ‘Somebody to Love’ that was pure Freddie,” the guitarist told Q in 1998. But Michael’s total package was all his own. —M.J.  

Umm Kulthum has no real equivalent among singers in the West: For decades the Egyptian star represented, and to an extent still does, the soul of the pan-Arab world. Her potent contralto, which could blur gender in its lower register, conveyed breathtaking emotional range in complex songs that, across theme and wildly-ornamented variations, could easily last an hour, as she worked crowds like a fiery preacher. Her death in 1975 brought millions into the Cairo streets to mourn, and while her influence among Arab singers is incalculable, it extended far beyond it. Dylan considered her “great.” Beyoncé prominently (and scandalously) used “Enta Omri” in her 2016 tour choreography. And Robert Plant conceded that “when I first heard the way [Umm Kulthum] would dance down through the scale to land on a beautiful note I couldn’t even imagine singing, it was huge: Somebody had blown a hole in the wall of my understanding of vocals.” —W.H.

Kate Bush was only 15 when she recorded a demo tape that made its way to Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, who helped her get her first record deal. “I definitely thought she was a true original and a great talent,” he said. With no traditional label expectations tethering her, she performed acrobatic feats with her voice in the explosive ardor of “Wuthering Heights,” the determination of “Cloudbusting,” and the sense of feminine humanity of “This Woman’s Work” and “Running Up That Hill.” Even on “Wild Man,” a song she recorded in her 50s, after her voice deepened, she pushed herself into brilliant contortions in the chorus. “You have to break your back before you even start to speak the emotion,” she once said. —K.G.

Howlin’ Wolf’s voice hits you like an elemental force: The sheer amount of lung power the 6’3”, 275-pound Chester Burnett unleashes on classic sides like “Smokestack Lightnin’” and “Spoonful” brings to mind a fire-and-brimstone preacher possessed by the strength of a hurricane. He influenced a generation of blues and rock shouters — including Mick Jagger and Steve Winwood — but none of his disciples ever came close to capturing the abrasive bellow and eerie high-pitched moans that made his stage name seem incredibly apt. “When you’re a kid and you’re trying to find your own voice, it’s rather daunting to hear somebody like Howlin’ Wolf, because you know that you’ll never achieve that,” Tom Waits once said. “That’s the Empire State Building. You can scream into a pillow for a year and never get there.” —H.S

Lady Gaga’s early classics play like slightly more strenuous variations on the great Madonna hits, though Stefani Germanotta was born with a more robust vocal range, a huskier natural tone, and an easier way with vocal acrobatics. In short, this was someone who’d grown up singing show tunes. The rah-rah crowd-pleaser in Gaga is also the best part of her as a singer: She lives to rouse, be it with an instantly ingratiating hook like “Bad Romance” or a power ballad — the form she was born for — such as “You and I.” —M.M.

Brian Wilson is so renowned for his producing and songwriting skills that his gifts as a vocalist are often overlooked, especially since his bandmates were so incredibly skilled in that department. But listen to “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and hear the sorrow and yearning he infuses into word. Check out “The Warmth of the Sun,” where he hits impossibly high notes. Even when he’s not singing lead, he still locks voices with his bandmates and creates some of the most sublime harmonies ever captured on tape. According to Wilson, it all came from the influence of Fifties vocal group the Four Freshman. “That is where I learned to arrange harmonies and also where I learned to sing falsetto,” Wilson said. “Their four-part harmony was totally original.” —A.G.

Barry White swore that, growing up, his voice was trebly. That changed when he was 13: “It frightened me with all the vibrating and stuff going on, and it sure frightened the hell out of my mother,” he said in 1977. “From then on, the voice was what it is today. Superclass.” Repeat: “the voice,” a basso even its owner thought of as a separate entity. That’s how resonant White was. He sounded the most direct come-hither in all of disco (where there was lots of competition), then watched his music get revived in the Nineties, helped along by a canny guest appearance on The Simpsons. —M.M.

Raw, passionate, and ferocious: Tina Turner is the Queen of Rock & Roll for a reason. Her raspy, soulful delivery while fronting the Ike & Tina Turner Revue bridged the segregated relationship between R&B and pop, inspiring decades of rock singers in her wake to imitate her vivacious sensuality and emotional potency, which can be heard as clearly on record as it could be seen when she was onstage. While early Ike & Tina hits like “Nutbush City Limits” and “Proud Mary” set the tone, it was her miraculous Eighties comeback that solidified her legacy. Turner’s authoritative command of slick Eighties production trends on albums like Private Dancer and Break Every Rule turned her into the pop diva she was always destined to be, setting the tone for pop-rock anthems and power ballads for decades to come. —B.S. 

As the Red Headed Stranger himself once put it, “I never pretended to have a great voice. It works and I can carry a tune. If you have a good song, that’s about all that’s required.” In fact, that kind of laid-back understatement is a huge part of what makes the country legend so great. For more than six decades, Willie Nelson’s unique baritone is plain-spoken yet complex, slightly nasal yet welcoming, earthy yet sophisticated. Besides all but rebooting country music in his 1970s outlaw era, Nelson has explored standards (the quintuple platinum 1978 album Stardust), jazz (Two Men With the Blues, his 2008 live album with Wynton Marsalis, hit No. 20 on the Billboard 200), and yes, his beloved reggae (Countryman, his 53rd album, released in 2005, on which he worked for a decade). Whatever he wraps his voice around, the song has the ring of eternal truth. —J.G.

Playful, sturdy, supple, and sharp, Miriam Makeba was a fountain of vocal personality. She could scat and swing on the township jazz hit “Pata Pata” or croon with bright warmth on the folk ballad “Lakutshon’ Ilanga,” a song she made famous in the 1959 film Come Back, Africa. As a South African musician living under apartheid, Makeba’s work could be inherently political, even though that’s a label she often rejected despite lifelong activism. Indeed, to listen to her now, years after her death, is to experience an artist who brilliantly communicates the joy of being alive. —M.R.

Each time he opens that extra-wide mouth to sing, Mick Jagger reveals one of his influences as a vocalist: His guttural-growl moments show off his love of the blues, his flights into falsetto reveal his deep bond with R&B and soul, and those deadpan drawls connect him to country and other roots music. But from the Stones’ earliest blues covers, Jagger was never a mimic. For all his influences, that sometimes sinister, sometimes insouciant, sometimes pleading voice has always been very much his own. Others have tried to ape him, but Jagger remains one of the most distinctive singers in rock history, whether he’s playing with fire, sympathizing with Satan, or just missing you. —D.B.

Sade Adu rose out of London’s New Romantic scene of the 1980s, a Nigerian-born fashion designer who crossed over to music. She proved herself the ultimate smooth operator, in hits like “Your Love Is King,” “Kiss of Life,” and “The Sweetest Taboo.” Her languid cool has a way of making everyone else sound histrionic. “I’m fairly understated, and that reflects in the way I sing,” Sade told Rolling Stone in 1985. “I don’t necessarily think that you have to scream and shout to move somebody.” In all these years, the serene poise of her voice has never faltered. —R.S.