Lata Mangeshkar features on Rolling Stone's '200 Best Singers of All Time' list

Lata Mangeshkar, the late veteran playback singer, is the only Indian on the "200 Best Singers of All Time" list released by American culture magazine Rolling Stone. The singer was ranked 84 among other pop icons like Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Beyonce.

Describing 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.

Other artists on the list 

The top 20 artists in the list are:

1. Aretha Franklin, 2. Whitney Houston, 3. Sam Cooke, 4. Billie Holiday, 5. Mariah Carey, 6. Ray Charles, 7. Stevie Wonder, 8. Beyonce, 9. Otis Redding, 10. Al Green, 11. Little Richard, 12. John Lennon, 13. Patsy Cline, 14. Freddie Mercury, 15. Bob Dylan, 16. Prince, 17. Elvis Presley, 18. Celia Cruz, 19. Frank Sinatra and 20. Marvin Gaye. 

Pakistan's Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan ranks 91 on the list 

Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, whose music is wildly popular even in India, was also part of the list at 91.

The magazine wrote, “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.”

Lata Mangeshkar breathed her last in 2022

Lata Mangeshkar passed away in February 2022 at the age of 92. The singer sang more than 30,000 songs in 35 different languages over the course of her 80-year career. For her beautiful voice, she was dubbed "The Nightingale of India" and awarded the Bharat Ratna in 2001.