The 200 Greatest Singers of All Time

Gawky, frilly, highfalutin — Bryan Ferry doesn’t exactly have what we think of as a classic set of pipes. Yet what his voice has accomplished has often been astonishing. Behold, Dracula as soul man: no joke. Ferry’s keening timbre and drama-ready intonation have the distanced stylization of his peer David Bowie — only Ferry is both cooler in temperament (as evident in his affinity for smirky asides) and more passionate vocally. He transforms other people’s material utterly — see his 1976 turning of Wilbert Harrison’s R&B plea “Let’s Stick Together” into a sweaty disco stomp — and is the letter-perfect interpreter of his own overloaded, overdramatic, overwhelming lyrics. —M.M.

One of the Queen of Rockabilly’s many nicknames was “the sweet lady with the nasty voice,” and that dichotomy is why she so artfully kicked in the door of the boys’ club that was early rock & roll. Rave-ups like the punchy “Hard Headed Woman” and the saucy “Cool Love” were given heat-lightning energy by her rasp-edged wail, but her versatility was apparent on more heartfelt tracks like the wistful “In the Middle of a Heartache.” Jackson retired in 2021, but her legacy lives on in many babyfaced baddies. —M.J.   

Levon Helm was the Band’s only American member, and the Canadian quintet’s sepia-tinted down-home vignettes never would have had the same warmth or vividness if it weren’t for the drummer and sometime mandolinist’s guileless drawl. It’s hard to imagine any other voice but Helm’s injecting the “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” a historically thorny tale of fictitious Confederate soldier Virgil Caine, with real pathos, or so convincingly embodying the weary traveler who pulls into Nazareth at the outset of “The Weight.” “His truth in that vocal could tear your heart out,” Band leader Robbie Robertson wrote in his memoir. Decades on, that same voice would also bring new richness to material by Bruce Springsteen, Steve Earle, and the Grateful Dead. —H.S.

She made her legend on standards and Broadway: “Look, I’m considered this kind of … institution thing,” she told Rolling Stone in 1971. “I play for middle-class audiences in Vegas.” But there’s a reason she’s here and her show-tune peers aren’t. Start with her chops: an unconventional mezzo-soprano that can span octaves, be brassy and sassy, and hold notes for stupefying long periods of time. And that voice isn’t merely capable of putting across cabaret and Sondheim, but pretty much the entire range of American popular music: Seventies soundtrack ballads, disco collaborations with Barry Gibb and Donna Summer, and rock-era classics by Laura Nyro, Carole King, even David Bowie. In her hands they all sound like … butta. -–D.B.

A R&B shouter with jazz chops, Ruth Brown arrived at that midcentury moment when her aggressive but always playful attack helped invent rock & roll — the way she snapped off lines with a squeal helped invent Little Richard specifically — and her many Atlantic Records hits had people calling the label the House that Ruth Built. On “(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean,” those delighted squeals allow Miss Rhythm, as she was billed, to nail down the new big beat even as they let mama, and us, know that “mean” ain’t the only way she’s treated. —D.C.

“To me, the vocals are more important than guitar playing — or anything, really,” Polly Jean Harvey told Rolling Stone in 1993. She meant it: Harvey’s vocal approach has changed tack many times over the years, and every time, it’s striking. The rocking roar of Dry and Rid of Me, her first two albums, in 1992 and 1993, bent toward blues with To Bring You My Love in 1995, went toward a lighter, airier, clearer voice on White Chalk in 2007, adding a near-Broadway breadth and depth for Let England Shake in 2011. The opera lessons she began mid-career helped. But they were merely icing on a voice that was commanding from jump. —M.M.

Love may be the greatest singer on this list whose best-known songs don’t immediately come to mind. Her name didn’t appear on her first classic record, 1962’s “He’s a Rebel” (it was credited to the Crystals, not Love’s own group of session singers, the Blossoms). And in her prime, she rarely received credit for singing backup on classics like the Crystals’ “He’s Sure the Boy I Love,” the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” and the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling.” But the roof-raising force of her husky alt can’t be denied. Even though Love didn’t have an extensive solo career, no one could cut through Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound like she did, especially on “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),” rock & roll’s greatest holiday epic and her signature song. —L.T.

I’ve never heard a bad Luciano performance live, even when he’s doing a backflip off a speaker. And in the studio, the Jamaican star is just as dynamic. The first time I produced Luci, I noticed his ability to instantly come up with a melody that seemed classic. When Luciano came on the scene in the Nineties, his tunes like “Sweep Over My Soul” and “It’s Me Again Jah” immediately entered the reggae canon. Luciano once sang that he had “the voice of a trumpet.” If anything, that’s an undersell; he’s got a range that extends from a rich baritone up to a strong falsetto. And he’s a master of the lost art of harmonizing — Luciano would be a top vocal arranger in N.Y. or L.A., if he weren’t so committed to the roots. —M.G.

Stylistics lead singer Russell Thompkins Jr.’s falsetto soared so high it almost squeaked — in his junior-high glee club, he said, “There was a girls’ chorus, and I was the only male in it.” There was an otherworldliness to his voice that gave his love plaints both grace and force. (Even his inhalations were gorgeous — see the spine-tingling breath intake preceding the first chorus of “People Make the World Go Round.”) On definitive early-Seventies love jams like “You Are Everything,” “You Make Me Feel Brand New,” and “Betcha By Golly, Wow,” his supernally precise singing defined R&B romanticism and gave the falsetto tradition new heights to hit. —M.M.

Boasting the biggest voice of the Y2K teen-idol crop, Christina Aguilera was as much a soul powerhouse as she was a TRL staple early in her career, with songs like “What a Girl Wants” and her posse-cut cover of “Lady Marmalade” making room for her jazz-inspired vocal runs. But when she recorded “Beautiful,” the self-esteem-boosting ballad from her 2002 album, Stripped, she leveled up; the take used on the final version was intended to be just a demo, but the raw emotional power she unleashed made it final-cut worthy. Since then, Aguilera has flaunted the versatility of her voice, with songs like the delicate ballad “Say Something” showing how her restrained moments can be just as powerful as the songs she belts. —M.J.     

It’s easy to take Bono for granted since the artist’s commendable activism and outsized onstage personality often overshadow the reason he even has these platforms: his voice. Since the early Eighties, Bono has pushed his voice to every extreme as he has approximated how to be a singer. On “Pride (In the Name of Love),” his love letter to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he belts, croons, swoons, and hums as he calculates Dr. King’s passion. On “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses,” his voice winds and bends, with a little true grit thrown in for good measure. And on the soulful ballad “In a Little While,” he pleads with the same intensity of Marvin Gaye before slipping into his distinctively Bono falsetto with a range that spans both tone and emotion. —K.G.

Rocío Dúrcal is considered “la Española más Méxicana” (the most Mexican Spaniard). Her soulful renditions of rancheras, arrangements with Mariachi, and lioness-like theatrics during performances made Dúrcal one of the most beloved female artists in Latin America through the Eighties and Nineties. Dúrcal had a way of marrying a warm softness of her mezzo soprano with intense, dark belting on career highlights like the gorgeous Juan Gabriel-penned “Amor Eterno” or the romantic ballad “La Gata Bajo la Lluvia,” where the deep passion in her gorgeous runs summons the feeling of longing for a lost loved one like few singers could. —T.M.

Few singers in American popular music sang with more empathy than Merle Haggard, who delivered the tales of the restless wanderers, drifting drunks, lustful loners, and condemned convicts who populated his songs with the intensity of a method actor. Listen to Haggard’s phrasing on “If We Make It Through December,” lingering on words like “December” and “coldest” to convey hardship while he glides through the far-off fantasy when singing the words “California” and “summertime.” With his rich, expressive baritone, Haggard used space, breathing, and vibrato to communicate the universes of pain and longing in his songs. But more than his immense sheer technical ability, Haggard always knew better than anyone how to use his voice as a profound storytelling device. —J.B.

“I tend to shy away from people, from audiences and I have to acknowledge that I am uncomfortable … when people put me in the spotlight,” El DeBarge admitted in 1992. Thankfully, that reticence did not extend to the recording studio, where El’s voice blossomed, first in the family group DeBarge and then on his own — lean and elastic, zooming into falsetto with apparent breathtaking ease. The ribbons of notes he lets loose during the finish of the group’s “All This Love” are like caramel; nearly three decades later, he sang the solo “Second Chance” with such lithe grace that when his voice broke a little at the end, it took the listener with it. —M.M.

One of the many reasons that Ms. Lauryn Hill is an icon is because her pipes are as pristine as her high-level bars. Her singing voice is earthy and robust but also delicate, often in stark contrast to her bold and biting delivery as an MC. As a result, she has encouraged a generation of performers to tap into their dualities. Before releasing her bona fide classic (and only) album, 1998’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, she reportedly told one of the project’s background singers, Lenesha Randolph, that people were not ready for her approach to singing and rapping. “I don’t know if people are gonna like this album, because I’m just singing, and nobody wants to hear rappers sing,” she said. Randolph was shocked, “Because when you hear her sing, and then hear her speak — it had such power and volume and rasp. It was something to strive for.” —M.C.

Since her 2010 breakout hit “Good Day” (which garnered deserved praise for its magnificent three-note climax), IU has become one of the most highly regarded vocalists in South Korean music. Despite having a soft voice, she has a wide range, a powerful delivery, and a versatility that’s allowed her to move easily from bossa nova to Nineties chamber pop and from jazz to ballads. In 2022, she became the first Korean female soloist to headline a concert at Seoul’s Olympic Stadium, selling out the venue in five minutes, with peers and admirers like Jung Kook of BTS, Jihyo and Jeongyeon of Twice, and TXT’s Soobin and Beomgyu there to celebrate her triumph. —K.K.

Everything about Guns N’ Roses felt sleazier and more ruthless than what had come before, and the centerpiece of their sound was one of the most outrageous voices ever heard in rock. Throughout their 1987 classic, Appetite for Destruction, Axl’s voice shape-shifts constantly, conveying dead-eyed menace on the low end (“It’s So Easy,” “Mr. Brownstone”) and demonic fury in the high (“Welcome to the Jungle,” “Out ta Get Me”), while also touching on androgynous yearning (“Sweet Child o’ Mine”) and pure cocky swagger (“Paradise City”). Ballads like “Patience” and “November Rain” broadened his palette, and reminded fans that there was just as much Elton John as Freddie Mercury and Janis Joplin in his vocal DNA. —H.S.

Young’s falsetto has so much emotional baggage that it’s the heaviest in popular music. His instrument is distinct and complex, at times dizzyingly tender (“After the Gold Rush,” “Mellow My Mind,” “Expecting to Fly”) yet wise and unwavering (“Powderfinger,” “Ambulance Blues,” and the highly underrated “Touch the Night”). It’s influenced many — perhaps most famously a young Thom Yorke — yet Young doesn’t understand its greatness himself. “My own voice is a fuckin’ mystery to me,” he told Jimmy McDonough in the Young biography Shakey. “I don’t know where it is. It sounds so different all the time. I can sing soft and it sounds like one guy, I can sing loud and screamin’ and it sounds like another completely different guy. I got several different voices in me. And the looser I get, the more I sing — the better I get.” —A.M.

The phrase “hard country” was coined as an analog, not to hard rock, but to hard liquor — the strongest stuff on the shelf — and Loretta Lynn’s voice was 190-proof. She was a straight shooter, declamatory in the best sense: You were hearing not just a woman’s point of view, but this woman’s, and it was not going to let unfairness of whatever sort go unremarked. That she was a first-rate funny woman in song only made the angry stuff more convincing — see “Fist City” for the feisty version and “One’s on the Way” for the everywoman one. And her late-career renaissance was for real vocally; the remakes on 2021’s Still Woman Enough stand tall. —M.M.

Reflecting his roots in everything from Led Zeppelin and Yes to Edith Piaf and Barbra Streisand, Jeff Buckley was that rare vocalist of his era — the Nineties — who luxuriated in more than just alt-rock bemoaning. Like Robert Plant, one of his heroes, he could start a song quietly, with a whisper, before working his way up to an almost carnal, savage intensity (check out “Mojo Pin” from his lone fully completed studio album, Grace). He also added layers of vulnerability, tenderness, and melodrama that marked him as a chanteur, and one with a multi-octave voice. His death in 1997, at age 30, robbed pop of an artist whose voice was surely to venture to many more territories. —D.B.

Courtney Love came from a punk tradition of women who didn’t care about singing pretty, and she brought that sensibility closer to the rock mainstream than any other singer of the past 30 years. Her impact was immediate, most notably on her husband, Kurt Cobain. Love’s distinctive rasp personifies the agony and ecstasy of being a woman, and does so in a way that’s fun to yell along to. From the almost unlistenable intensity of 1991’s Pretty on the Inside to Hole’s breakout Live Through This, all the way through to more recent singles, like the 2015 toxic friendship anthem “Miss Narcissist,” no one sings like Courtney. “I was always the only person with the nerve to sing, and so I got stuck with it,” she once told MTV. And she’s right. No one has the nerve to remain so raw. —B.E.

Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford threw down a spiked leather gauntlet with his vertiginous opening wail on 1976’s “Victim of Changes” (“Whiskey woman, don’t you know that you are driving me in-saaaaaane!”), and in the decades since, the man known as the Metal God has kept on sharpening his voice into the ideal instrument for the genre he so proudly epitomizes. From the raspy, attitude-heavy style heard on early-Eighties classics like “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’” and “Living After Midnight” to the banshee shriek of 1990’s “Painkiller.” Slayer’s Kerry King told Rolling Stone that Halford “hits notes and holds notes for a duration that’s almost inhuman. It’s like Eddie Van Halen playing guitar; that’s Rob Halford singing.” —H.S.  

One of the great voices to emerge this millennium, the leader of Florence + the Machine is a powerhouse diva of the old but still powerful school: a leather-lunged dynamo with range, character, emotion, and daring. With an unafraid sense of brassiness that matches the sheer size of her voice, Welch’s sheer zest for her work is striking: Every oversized emotion is played for real, but her playfulness underpins everything. “Singing makes me feel in control and more powerful,” she once said. “On stage is where I understand myself best. It feels real and like something I can actually do. It verifies me, defines me … I really don’t know what I’d do without it.” —M.M.

The tremulous undertow of Tammy Wynette’s voice was both an effect and a cunning interpretive device — it made her tales of country housewives and the men they stood by feel upfront and urgent. It also has a specifically country instrumental analog: Wynette is like a vocal version of the pedal-steel guitar, with its weepy tonality. (Her early hits were practically duets between her and the steel.) But “Stand by Your Man” wasn’t all she sang. It wasn’t just on upbeat numbers like “Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad” where her iron will showed through — it also did on the immortal weepie “D-I-V-O-R-C-E.” —M.M.

Forever associated with the holiday standard “This Christmas,” Donny Hathaway conveyed the sensuality, sociopolitical awareness, and spiritual angst of the Seventies Black experience. He studied music and piano at Howard University, and that training beams through songs like “The Ghetto,” where his voice shuffles and keeps time amidst the band’s funky, Latin-inflected arrangements. Hathaway epitomized warmth and vulnerability, the kind that could segue from an incandescent quiet storm moment like “The Closer I Get to You,” a duet with Roberta Flack, to the brilliantly anguished gospel prayer “Lord Help Me.” He may have been troubled, but he made his listeners feel protected. —M.R.

Joe Strummer always wore his heart on his sleeve. With the Clash, he could knock you flat with his mighty roar, but he could do a lot more than that — his deceptively gruff yowl was an astonishingly flexible instrument, which is how he could hit such a wide emotional range. Strummer could do rage, sure, but he had a unique gift for jolly let’s-go warmth, in the comic flights of “Bank Robber” or “Safe European Home.” He could do elegiac tenderness, as in “Spanish Bombs” or “Straight to Hell.” Or he could just could turn into the voice of doom, as in “Armagideon Time.” If you ever doubt his smarts as a singer, just listen to “London Calling,” in his intricate emotional swerves from anger (“Now get this!”) to mirth to terror. It’s a three-minute vocal master class. —R.S.

Much as Robert Johnson can sound like two guitarists in one, the 1930s Delta blues legend’s voice reveals different facets as his performances unfold. So many of the Johnson myths portray his talents as elemental, but in moments like the bittersweet wordless moan that precedes each verse on “Sweet Home Chicago,” or the way he echoes his yearning upper-register lines with rueful lower ones on “Hellhound on My Trail,” you can tell how much the nuances of a song mattered to him. Other Delta bluesmen could sound rougher (Charley Patton) or more forlorn (Skip James); Johnson’s gift as a vocalist was to make his solo renditions feel like miniature dramas unfolding in the listener’s mind. —H.S.

Birds may or may not literally suddenly appear every time she is near. But if they don’t, that’s on them, because Karen Carpenter is the ultimate easy-listening thrush-queen. She had one of the most Seventies voices of the Seventies — lilting, supple, vacant, and calming, with just the right air of emotional malaise to bring out the two-car, sunken-den, suburban-dream underbelly in classics like “We’ve Only Just Begun” and “(They Long to Be) Close to You.” Just as her brother Richard’s sheer orchestral-pop arrangements became an influence on Nineties indie-pop bands like St. Etienne and Stereolab, so did the glowing, imperious distance in everything Karen sang. —J.D.

A self-described method actress who worked her way into a song by immersing in its sentiment, Donna Summer had the pipes of a Broadway belter, but she made her fortune — and music history — by murmuring sensually over some of disco’s most delicious concoctions. Her vocal peak there isn’t even “I Feel Love,” immortal as it is, but “Try Me, I Know We Can Make It.” She was also a master narrator — her steel-edged delivery of “She Works Hard for the Money” (or should that be steel-toed?) could have worked on Hill Street Blues. —M.M.

Jackie Wilson had the vocal chops to make it as an opera singer, but he brought his four-octave range to the world of R&B and cut classics like “Lonely Teardrops,” “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher & Higher,” and “Baby Workout.” Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson were both enormous fans, and they were crushed when he fell into a coma while singing “Lonely Teardrops” at a 1975 show in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. “Jackie Wilson was key in helping bridge the gap between an old-style R&B and a new incarnation of soul,” said J. Geils Band frontman Peter Wolf. “Even Elvis Presley knew why Wilson was called ‘Mr. Excitement’: I heard that seeing Wilson perform made the King want to hide under the table.” —A.G.

An easy Southern tenor with a lot of natural husk — of course Charlie Rich could be, and often was, compared to Elvis Presley. But his slightly sandier tonality, and the fact that he sang jazz as adeptly as he did country and rockabilly, gave him his own highly individual tang. That was especially clear on ballads: Rich’s elongated vowels on “Life’s Little Ups and Downs” are pure edge-of-your-chair drama. And he makes the absolute resignation of “Feel Like Going Home” seem like a state of grace. —M.M.

If an air horn could sing, it’d sound like Barrington Levy: cutting, commanding, and a signal that the next tune is about to be massive. Levy became a Jamaican dancehall star at 14. A series of local hits followed. Next came classic albums like 1979’s Shaolin Temple and 1982’s Poor Man Style. Then international smashes like “Black Roses” and the iconic “Under Mi Sensi.” In the four decades that followed, Levy’s class of dancehall brethren petered out. But somehow, Levy managed to keep that horn of his loud as hell, and very much in tune. —N.S.

In Creedence Clearwater Revival, whose run of hits from 1969 to 1971 remains a stunning achievement, John Fogerty’s gut-bucket songwriting and way with a hook made him sound like an everyman. But so did his voice, a tenor that could move from a good-time chug to a meaningful roar. It’s also a little more nuanced than it first seems. The guy who rages on “Fortunate Son” and plays the backwoods prophet on “Bad Moon Rising” transmits casual joy on “Lookin’ Out my Back Door” and genuine sorrow on “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” A useful instrument for some of the most classic of classic rock. —J.G.

During her early days in Brooklyn with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith used to sing him to sleep. He liked her voice, even if she didn’t yet. “I guess I got a lot of guts, but I never really had that great a voice,” Smith recently told NPR. At the time, she wanted to be a poet, not a singer — but with the release of 1975’s Horses, she realized she could be both. Influenced by opera and Edith Piaf as much as Jim Morrison and Dylan, her unconventional approach to rock belting inspired generations of artists who were sick of being told how not to sing. Straddling the line between poet and singer, Smith twisted the borders of what music could be and say with her bold-as-brass voice. It’s music to hear her talk, and it’s storytelling to hear her sing. —B.E.

Chet Baker’s retiring sigh is a cool surface just barely hiding a reservoir of shattered emotion, a voice that acted as its own plunger mute. That seething introversion — not hurt by Baker’s strikingly high cheekbones — became his calling card, even more than his equally shadowy trumpet playing. “No one, least of all Baker, seems to have fully fathomed the widespread, long-term appeal of his singing,” American Songbook historian Will Friedwald wrote in his book The Great Jazz and Pop Vocal Albums, pointing out how Baker’s powerful restraint impacted “Brazilian devotees like Joao Gilberto, who absorbed his vocal style.” —M.M.

Neo-soul pioneer Erykah Badu has a lithe, knowing voice and a precise, yet often-surprising approach to her lyrics that makes songs like her winding 1997 breakthrough hit “On & On” and her expansive, dreamy 2010 track “Window Seat” feel as if they’re floating on a cloud. Badu’s musical blend of jazz, hip-hop, soul, and future-minded mysticism nestles in beautifully with her instrument, which has the range and depth of old-school greats like Nina Simone and Billie Holiday while also possessing a defiantly 21^st-century creative spark. —M.J.    

The Pretenders frontperson has never liked being called a punk-rock guiding light. “It just means that I’m older than them, that I was there before they were. I wasn’t a pioneer,” she said in 2006. But a certain old-soul quality has always been a huge part of her mystique — from the way she mixed fierce swagger with cool remove on “Precious” to the tender intimacy of “Kid” and “Stop Your Sobbing.” It says something about her unique musical and emotional range that she’s felt at home doing duets with Sinatra and Cher, or covering tunes by Brian Wilson, Nick Drake, and Hoagy Carmichael on her 2019 album, Valve Bone Woe. That mix of style, power, and depth has influenced countless artists over the years, from Madonna to the Linda Lindas. —L.T.

Linda Caballero, known as La India, is known for her mighty belting power, and the way she releases her voice over intricate salsa arrangements often feels as satisfying as a long-held exhale. The singer was born in Puerto Rico and raised in the Bronx, where she drew the attention of salsa luminaries like Eddie Palmieri, who produced one of her earliest albums, and Tito Puente, who worked with her to re-create several swing classics. And though she’s proven her versatility across all styles of music, her vocal prowess is at its most effective on unapologetic salsa hits such as “Mi Mayor Venganza” and “Ese Hombre,” where she uses her stunning abilities to give women some of most enduring Spanish-language anthems of self-empowerment and independence. —J.L.

Ozzy Osbourne doesn’t have what most people would call a good voice, but boy does he have a great one. His bombastic shout is reminiscent of drill bits and electric guitar feedback, his phrasing is not nimble, but the way he sounds like no one else is a superpower. By theatrically embracing those unique limits, and by wholeheartedly committing to the bit — a grand guignol carnival barker, a crazy train conductor — Ozzy not only manages to out-blast guitar gods like Tony Iommi and Randy Rhoads but proves himself a riveting heavy-metal yarn spinner, menacing but full of good humor. —D.C.

Although it’s easy to focus on Fiona Apple’s brilliant lyrics, the way she uses her voice is where her superpower flexes hardest. She feels her songs deeply and performs them almost like show tunes, echoing two of her earliest influences, jazz vocalists Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. On an early career hit like “Shadowboxer,” her voice sounds deep and viscous, sliding in and out of her brooding and hopeful moods. On “Fast as You Can,” it quivers in semitones like twanging spring. She all but raps on “Shameika” but keeps it on pitch, adding a little airiness to her delivery. “I don’t feel like I’m such a great singer, like a beautiful voice, but I feel like I’m good at playing my voice,” she said recently. “It’s just another instrument now. But it’s the best instrument. It makes so many noises.” —K.G.

When Abel Tesfaye became a buzzy cult favorite in the early 2010s — and when he broke through to pop superstardom a few years later — his easy command of melody and his taste for dark, druggy imagery were part of the reason why. But his voice was the X factor that made him one of the most influential acts of his generation: a high, lonesome clarion call cutting through the fog of the pop charts. Tesfaye has credited his unique timbre to the Ethiopian artists he grew up listening to as a kid in Toronto, icons like Aster Aweke and Mulatu Astatke. “I’m not here to do Luther Vandross runs,” he told an interviewer in 2015. “I can’t do what Jennifer Hudson does. But the feeling in my music and in my voice is very Ethiopian and very African and much more powerful than anything, technically.” —S.V.L.

Pete Townshend wrote the vast majority of the Who’s catalog, but it was Roger Daltrey’s vocals that brought it to life. This didn’t come naturally to him until they recorded the rock opera Tommy. “Tommy gave me a canvas that was big enough to really, really take some chances,” he told Rolling Stone in 2013. “Once we got out on the road and sang it live, it just took off on its own and my voice grew with it.” That confidence is easy to hear on his primal scream at the end of “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” and the soaring climax of “Love, Reign O’er Me.” —A.G. 

Brazil’s premiere singer-songwriter, the nation’s homegrown Dylan equivalent, a revolutionary rocker with a heavy literary bent, Caetano Veloso is a master performer, his velvety burr and palpable intelligence giving a surge even — especially — when he’s laying back and murmuring. But he’s also delightful when he revs the tempo and throws in excitable whoops and trills — and he gets all of it across in English as well as Brazilian Portuguese. “I think what’s difficult for us in the North to accept is that somebody can be radical politically, culturally, and musically, and yet can still be romantic and love a beautiful, sensuous melody,” David Byrne observed in 1999. “Caetano can pull that off.” —M.M.

Obviously, no one would consider Lou Reed’s singing virtuosic unto itself. But for personality, point of view, and a one-of-a-kind voiceprint that has, in turn, stamped generations of singers after it, Reed was indeed the man. Bands from the Feelies to Yo La Tengo to Parquet Courts copped Lou’s groovily flat vocal style, not just his churning rhythm guitar — hell, the singing on the third Velvet Underground album alone invented a sub-style of college-radio crooning. And in galloping rocker mode, his nervous flatness often goosed his songs — “Sweet Jane” and “Rock & Roll” are just the beginning. —M.M.

Some singers let loose; Bill Withers never had to. Without resorting to histrionics, his voice conveyed absolute authority and sincerity, whether he was singing about longing (“Ain’t No Sunshine”), lust (“Use Me”), or familial love (“Grandma’s Hands”). His measured delivery collapsed the distance between folk and funk, gospel and AM gold, creating a new lane of salt-of-the-earth R&B on Still Bill, and classing up disco on Menagerie. “Not only has he written great songs,” Stevie Wonder said of Withers when inducting him into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, “he sang them incredibly well.” —H.S.

Eddie Vedder was a SoCal surfer dude who drifted to Seattle, where he blew up into one of the most iconic, influential rock voices of the past 40 years. With Pearl Jam, Vedder flexes his brawny baritone in pained ballads like “Daughter,” “Nothingman,” and “Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town.” But he can also wail in the flat-out fury of “Black” or “Not for You.” Historically, he’s the link between 1970s Springsteen-style heartland growl and West Coast punk rage. He’s hugely influential on country, too — you can hear him in singers like Chris Stapleton. His most legendary performance might be Temple of the Dog’s “Hunger Strike,” in his epic call-and-response with Chris Cornell. The ultimate grunge soul man. —R.S.

The fluttery edges of Aaron Neville’s tenor are subtle but cunning and sometimes thrillingly dramatic. Listen to the way he slightly raises the end of every line of the Neville Brothers’ “Yellow Moon,” the title track of their 1989 masterpiece, or go back to his 1966 solo classic, “Tell It Like It Is.” There’s a deep humanity and grace in his singing — an essential sweetness, like maple syrup spreading over a stack of pancakes. “People say they wish they could tell me what my voice does to them,” he said in 1989, “and I say I wish I could tell them what it does to me to be able to sing.” —M.M.

The cult of Leonard Cohen rightly centers on his lyrical genius, but without his voice, that dusky, quasi-biblical rumble, his words never would have had the same gravity. Even on his early albums, when his delivery was at its most supple, it had a singularly spooky quality, which only deepened as his range settled into its mature form, that deliciously sinister half-croon, half-croak that complemented the rakish, pitch-black wit of albums like I’m Your Man and The Future. By the end of his life — especially on his final album You Want It Darker, released just weeks before his death in 2016 — he was narrating more than singing, his range essentially nonexistent, but it was exactly the right medium for the existential bluesman he’d always been in the process of becoming. —H.S.

One could teach an entire class on Swift’s vocal evolution — it’s that fascinating. A decade ago, including her on this list would have been a controversial move, but recent releases like Folklore, Evermore, and Midnights officially settled the argument. That breathy timbre contains so much versatility — just think about the range from the triumphant “State of Grace” to the blissed-out “Lover” to the blast that is “Look What You Made Me Do.” Or the phrasing on the reflective “You’re on Your Own Kid.” Or even “Seven,” where she stunned us with a delicate upper register that made the word “pleaaaase” sound as angelic as any “pleaaaase” ever sung. With each passing year of her nearly two-decade career, her songwriting gets better and better — a never-ending quest in which her only competition is herself. The same goes for her voice. —A.M

Gladys Knight never quite gets the respect due to her. Her reading-the-riot-act crossover smash “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” was instantly replaced in the popular consciousness by Marvin Gaye’s cover, and she tended not to be hailed as the queen of anything. Her church-trained voice, warm and wise, was more approachable than that. On classic tales like “Neither One of Us” and “Midnight Train to Georgia,” she played a woman who’d been around the block and who we knew (thanks to the Pips’ call-and-response community) had stayed there. The queen of loving and losing, but lasting. —D.C.