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Aretha Franklin
A force of nature. A work of genius. A gift from the heavens. Aretha
Franklin’s voice is all that and more, which is why she remains the
unchallenged Queen, years after her final bow. Her singing is the most
magnificent sound to emerge from America — more universal than
Coltrane’s horn, bolder than Hendrix’s guitar. She blew up worldwide with
her 1967 hit “Respect,” claiming her throne as the greatest pop, rock, or
soul singer ever. As Mary J. Blige told Rolling Stone, “She is the reason
why women want to sing.”
Aretha could express jubilation, as heard in her gospel doc Amazing
Grace. She could summon the deepest heartbreak, in ballads like “Ain’t No
Way.” Her artistry is the greatest achievement of American music, if not
American history. But her voice is the crossroads where all different
musical traditions meet, from gospel to funk to rock to the blues. As she
said, “I guess you could say I do a lot of traveling with my voice.”
She grew up as Detroit gospel royalty, getting her lessons in the church
from Mahalia Jackson. At first, her label tried to mold her into a slick
lounge singer, but she quit the crossover game, after meeting another
young outsider on the label whose voice didn’t fit the pop mold: Bob
Dylan. As she told writer Gerri Hirshey, “Neither of us was what you call —
ah — mainstream.”
Aretha went to Muscle Shoals and became Lady Soul, creating her own
raw, intense R&B sound. She forced the mainstream to cross over to her,
changing the way music sounded ever since, all over the world. Her
genius has taken so many forms: 1970s gospel, 1980s glam-disco, her
collabos with disciples like Whitney Houston and Lauryn Hill. Or the night
she stole the Grammys, singing “Nessun Dorma” without a rehearsal.
But whatever she sang, she claimed it as her own. And as long as you live,
you’ll never hear anything like Aretha Franklin. That’s why her voice still
goes right on changing the world. Singer of singers. Queen of queens. All
hail Lady Soul. —R.S.
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Whitney Houston
The standard-bearer for R&B vocals, Whitney Houston possessed a
soprano that was as powerful as it was tender. Take her cover of Dolly
Parton’s “I Will Always Love You,” which became one of the defining
singles of the 1990s; it opens with her gently brooding, her
unaccompanied voice sounding like it’s turning over the idea of leaving
her lover behind with the lightest touch. By the end, it’s transformed into
a showcase for her limber, muscular upper register; she sings the title
phrase with equal parts bone-deep feeling and technical perfection,
turning the conflicted emotions at the song’s heart into a jumping-off
point for her life’s next step.
Houston’s self-titled 1985 debut came out a bit more than six months
before her 22nd birthday, and it established her as one of pop’s most
potent vocalists. That was no accident: In 1993, Houston recalled how her
upbringing, where she was around R&B greats like Aretha Franklin and
Roberta Flack — as well as her mother, the gospel singer Cissy Houston —
immersed her in the idea of belting out her feelings. “It had a great
impact on me as a singer, as a performer, as a musician. Growing up
around it, you just can’t help it,” she said. “I identified with it immediately.
It was something that was so natural to me that when I started singing, it
was almost like speaking.” Houston’s natural delivery made the moments
where she broke into record-breaking vocal runs; “Saving All My Love for
You,” from her 1985 debut, feels like a wrenching talk with a skittish lover
even as she’s hitting high notes, while the way her glum loneliness gives
over to giggly jubilance on the sad-happy standard-bearer “I Wanna
Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)” remains as delightful on the
100th listen as it did on the first. Houston voice will resonate for decades
beyond her 2012 passing. —M.J.
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Sam Cooke
There is American popular music before Sam
Cooke and popular music after. He was already a
gospel superstar with the Soul Stirrers when he
went solo in 1957 and immediately began defining
the idea of “soul music” both as a crossover star
and musical innovator. His tenor seduced on
1957’s “You Send Me,” and it enchanted on
“Wonderful World,” a song that in lesser hands
might’ve sounded corny. But few singers savored
being inside a song the way Cooke did. He did
spotless standards on 1964’s Live at the
Copacabana and a smooth version of gutbucket
R&B on One Night Stand — Live at the Harlem
Square Club, a badass 1963 set unreleased until
1985. And then there is his 1964 masterpiece “A
Change Is Gonna Come.” A civil rights activist
inspired by hearing Bob Dylan’s “Blowin in the
Wind,” Cooke wails “I was booorrrn by the river…”
over rising strings and matches the music emotion
for emotion. —J.G.
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Billie Holliday
Other jazz-vocal legends like Sarah Vaughan and Ella
Fitzgerald thrived on refinement; Billie Holiday
privileged emotional truth. It’s a quality that gave her
a special status among fellow artists, from her
longtime saxophone foil Lester Young to Miles Davis,
who wrote in his autobiography that when Holiday
would sing a ballad like “I Loves You Porgy,” about a
woman tormented by an abusive lover, “you could
almost feel that shit she was feeling. It was beautiful
and sad the way she sang that.” She’ll always be
known as a poet of gloom, her slow-drip delivery
perfectly suited to the forlorn (“Lover Man”) or
downright morbid (“Strange Fruit,” an aptly sickening
condemnation of lynching), but she could also use
the openness in her voice to convey overflowing
elation (“Too Marvelous for Words”). “Billie Holiday
makes you hear the content and intent of every word
she sings — even at the expense of her pitch or
tone,” Joni Mitchell once said. “Billie is the one that
touches me deepest.” —H.S.
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Mariah Carey
Range, dahhling, is exactly what Mariah Carey
possesses. Across five staggering octaves, the
Elusive Chanteuse can pivot easily between a
biting, taunting growl to an unreal whistle tone so
sharply delivered it could cut steel. Since 1990’s
“Vision of Love,” the singer-songwriter has always
straddled the delicate balance between old-school
soul and R&B with modern, often forward-thinking
pop. Her secret has long been a sweetness that
can be at times either angelic or devilish,
depending on how she wields the multitude of
secret vocal weapons she has in her arsenal.
Everything from coy, breathy coos to guttural, full-
bodied belts can be deployed with equally
electrifying results. By combining her operatic
vocal talents with a tough attitude and penchant
for high glamor and drama, Carey birthed
generations of imitators in her wake. But those she
influenced still can’t beat the architect of modern
pop’s sound. —B.S.
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Ray Charles
“People call me a jazz singer and a blues
singer, but I don’t really know the
difference,” Ray Charles told an interviewer
in 1963. “I just try to sing a song, and I only
sing songs I like to sing. And I try to put a
little bit of soul into everything.” He meant
everything — Charles was a titan of R&B,
pop, jazz, and country alike, and the reason
his first retrospective box set, in 1991, was
titled The Birth of Soul is because it was
Ray’s rewriting of a gospel song as the
straightforwardly lascivious “I Got a
Woman” that made soul music happen. And
he turned one of the most anodyne of
national hymns, “America the Beautiful,”
into a soul-wrenching epic. The man could
make anything soulful. —M.M.
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Stevie Wonder
Whatever tone Stevie Wonder is aiming for, from
starry-eyed romance to gritty realism, his voice can
convey it with ease. Few other singers could so
convincingly sell both the unabashed tenderness
of “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” or “I Just
Called to Say I Love You” and the simmering anger
that underlies “You Haven’t Done Nothin’” or
“Living for the City.” The last song showcases
Wonder’s patented growl, one of many vocal
tactics he uses to push a song into overdrive (see
also: the upper-register melodic acrobatics heard
on “Sir Duke” or the gospel-like swoops on the
climax of “They Won’t Go When I Go”). Talking
about singers who “squall,” or favor an overheated
delivery, in a 2014 interview, D’Angelo singled
Wonder out. “The thing about Stevie Wonder,” he
said, “was that he brought these vocal mechanics
into the squall that other ******** just couldn’t do.”
—H.S.
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Beyoncé
In Beyoncé’s voice lies the entire history of Black
music. She is one of pop’s great historians, an
artist so in love with the heroes who shape her
that she can’t help but find opportunities to pay
homage to them in her music, performance and, of
course, her singing. But there’s nothing derivative
about what Beyoncé does: Instead, she has heeded
the lessons she can glean from Prince, Tina, Diana,
Michael, Janet, Donna, and more and shaped
herself into an icon worth standing next to those
titans, even while still at the top of her game. At
times brashly Southern or cherubically hymnal, her
malleability and penchant for vocal theatricals
have allowed her range to successfully fit into
everything from funk to country to hard rock
(sometimes all on the same album). And she’s as
good a rapper as she is songbird, mastering each
turn with ineffable control and power. —B.S.
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Otis Redding
Onstage — start with his commanding
performance at 1967’s Monterey Pop
festival — Otis Redding was so boundless
and revved up that he could literally make
a stage shake. But especially in the studio,
his emotive rasp was a marvel of controlled
restraint. In his most penetrating soul
ballads, like “Try a Little Tenderness,” “Mr.
Pitiful,” and “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the
Bay,” Redding relished each anguished
word, adding exclamatory lines at the end
of phrases but never overdoing them.
Another testament to his power: the way he
could cover rock & roll hits, like “(I Can’t
Get No) Satisfaction” and “A Hard Day’s
Night,” and make you forget that anyone
had sung them before he had. —D.B.
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Al Green
There’s something feline about Al Green’s
voice — a sinuous flexibility that flares up
in places the listener isn’t expecting, which
is always welcome. Few singers create the
illusion of being carried away by the very
song they’re singing the way he can.
Whether he’s lying in a hard Memphis funk
groove, like a python ready to dart (see the
early “I’m a Ram”), or overdubbing multiple
ethereal falsettos (a la the climax of “Have
You Been Making Out OK”), the Rev. Green
can evoke rapturous transport like it’s
effortless. The truth was quite different —
he worked hard on his classics — but
whether he’s singing about God or eros,
Green is the ultimate soul man. —M.M.