Bhubaneswar: Lata Mangeshkar, the late veteran playback singer, is the only Indian who features on the “200 Best Singers of All Time” list of the American culture magazine Rolling Stone. The singer was ranked 84 among other pop icons like Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Beyonce.
Describing Lata as the Queen of Melody, Rolling Stone wrote, “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,” the magazine added.
The Top 20 artists on the list include Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston, Sam Cooke, Billie Holiday, Mariah Carey, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Beyonce, Otis Redding, Al Green, Little Richard, John Lennon, Patsy Cline, Freddie Mercury, Bob Dylan, Prince, Elvis Presley, Celia Cruz, Frank Sinatra and Marvin Gaye.
Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, whose music is wildly popular even in India, features 91th on the list.
Rolling Stone wrote, “Watching archival performances of the late Pakistani vocal master Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, 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.”
