Lata Mangeshkar, the only Indian singer to find a spot in Rolling Stone’s list of 200 Best Singers of All Time

Late legendary singer Lata Mangeshkar entered into the renowned American magazine Rolling Stone’s list of the 200 Best Singers of All Time. She claimed the 84th spot on the list, which also features artists such as Jungkook from the popular South Korean band BTS, late Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Amy Winehouse.

 

 

Speaking about Lata, the magazine 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."

 

Further, it read, "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."

 

Late American singer Aretha Franklin took the top spot on the list, followed by Whitney Houston and Sam Cook. Artists Billie Holiday, Mariah Carey, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Beyonce, Otis Redding and Al Green have been listed on the following positions filling the top 10 spots.

 

The list also includes names such as Bruce Springsteen, Taylor Swift, Bono, Michael Jackson, João Gilberto and Billie Eillish, among others.