The great female voices in the history of music | Sound Sofa

Music is, above all else, emotion. Emotion in its purest form. Although this emotion is transmitted in many ways, perhaps the one that leaves the greatest impact is the one that comes through the voice. Hear Aretha Franklin sing Amazing Grace unaccompanied is something that chills the blood, as much as listening to Billie Holiday’s broken tear, Nina Simone’s contained rage or the stark pain of Chavela Vargas and Édith Piaf.

In music, women have reigned with such a powerful voice that they put everything else in the background: their musicians, their addictions, their character. On Sofá Sonoro we have dedicated programs to all the great voices that fascinate us and to those albums that best captured them. This week we collect our favorite singers.

LISTEN TO THE PROGRAM ON APPLE | SPOTIFY | IVOOX

Billie Holiday

Billie Holiday lived an extremely hard and unfair life, full of physical and moral blows, perhaps that is why no one sang of pain like her, with so much heartbreak and honesty. In his career there are songs and records that reach heights of beauty that few artists, be they men or women, have reached. Perhaps the crudest sample of it was Lady in Satin, a testament to the brink of death that was his most ambitious and expensive album. Her voice was no longer that of her best days, but no one has sung like Lady Day on this album.

LISTEN TO THE PROGRAM ON APPLE | SPOTIFY | IVOOX

Ella Fitzgerald

Among the great divas of music, the dramas of Holiday and Simone always come before those of Ella Fitzgerald, who also had them. Her gift was not in recording the penalties with that rawness, but she had all the other virtues and her contagious joy and her incomparable phrasing elevated her to the alterations of music. His three albums with Louis Armstrong are a fantastic display of his strength and vocal ability.

LISTEN TO THE PROGRAM ON APPLE | SPOTIFY | IVOOX

Nina Simone

In the list of great voices in music, Nina Simone stands out for a peculiarity. She is usually the only one who also played an instrument while singing. Nina’s piano and voice captured in a unique way the understanding of Simone’s music, who also composed some of her greatest hits. Simone also had the most recognizable voice, a forceful, sometimes angry way of singing, which became the ideal vehicle for those songs against racism. Although his time at Phillips may be brighter, the records of the late 1960s and early 1970s for RCA are a tremendous display of his talent.

LISTEN TO THE PROGRAM ON APPLE | SPOTIFY | IVOOX

Etta James

Hear Etta James singing At Last -with just 22 years old- it is a wonderful experience. The voice of that young savage was framed for history thanks to that song and the album that gave it its name, an eternal album that also contains the sensual interpretation of I Just Want to Make Love to You and the overwhelming All I Could Do Was Cry. With that debut James made a hole in history. His life, with that of the vast majority of black performers of his time, was hard and marked by abuse, something that would weigh on his life and career, but in this debut all of that is insignificant when James sings that “My lonely days they have been left behind ”.

LISTEN TO THE PROGRAM ON APPLE | SPOTIFY | IVOOX

Edith Piaf

In the history of the great female voices of music, we must always make room for Édith Piaf, the girl who was born under a lamppost and who sang like a bird. Piaf lived a long time in a short time and understood and experienced love in a stark way. Intense like few others, the Frenchwoman knew how to take all this to the stage and is perhaps the vocalist who needed the least musical accompaniment to freeze the blood. After eating the world in bites and breaking boundaries and barriers, Piaf turned off singing that eternal hymn in which he assured that he did not regret anything.

LISTEN TO THE PROGRAM ON APPLE | SPOTIFY | IVOOX

Chavela Vargas

Chavela Vargas should go hand in hand with Piaf, another voice outside the Anglo-Saxon world with a unique ability to transmit emotions regardless of the language. Vargas had a very long and busy life, but he also starred as an adult in one of the strangest and most emotional musical comebacks in memory. In that final stage of his career, Vargas put fear and alcoholism out of his life to return to the stage. No voice has the ability to braid knots in your throat like that of Chavela singing A rare world or La Llorona.

LISTEN TO THE PROGRAM ON APPLE | SPOTIFY | IVOOX

Sarah Vaughan

In the shadow of the Holiday, Fitzgerald or Franklin the race of Sarah Vaughan, an institution in the US that perhaps lacked great successes to transcend in a more forceful way, but no one can question the talent or voice of the singer from New Jersey. His signature phrasing, with that bebop tone and that eternal breath illuminated one of the most fascinating voices in music and his album together with Clifford Brown 1955 is perhaps the best example of this.

LISTEN TO THE PROGRAM ON APPLE | SPOTIFY | IVOOX

Abbey Lincoln

Abbey Lincoln she can hold the heavy label of heir to Billie Holiday, a diligent pupil of the great jazz masters. His intense career spanned decades and styles and also touched on film and political activism. His records from the nineties for him Verve seal they are the ones that capture his best moment, a wonderful stage that arrived 40 years after his debut. At Sofá Sonoro we dedicate a program to his musical testament, to the album he recorded when he knew his time was running out, a work of tremendous emotional impact where he reviewed his own legacy.

LISTEN TO THE PROGRAM ON APPLE | SPOTIFY | IVOOX

Irma Thomas

There are cities in the world that are unique for different reasons. New Orleans is because of its music. Unique artists such as Louis Armstrong, Professor Longhair, Allen Toussaint, Dr John or the wonderful Irma Thomas, the best representative of the tradition of that small southern town. Thomas’ musical journey is eventful, sometimes interrupted by hurricanes, but it got off to a splendid start by Toussaint and the singles they recorded together before the pianist had to enlist in the military, prompting Thomas to record. Wish Someone Woud Care, to California. That debut contains three pieces of enormous beauty: the eternal Time Is On My Side, the one that gave the album its name -with Thomas’s signature- and the earthquake of Break-A-Way.

LISTEN TO THE PROGRAM ON APPLE | SPOTIFY | IVOOX

Other unique voices

Apart from jazz, soul or gospel, there are voices that have left their mark on music and that deserve their place in history. Whitney Houston with that unique torrent swept in the eighties with a series of albums that elevated her as the great diva of that generation. His success is perhaps also his condemnation since the production so pop and so eighties makes his records less eternal than those of the great jazz stars.

PLAYLIST WITH OUR FAVORITE SONGS BY EACH ARTIST