Late singer Lata Mangeshkar gets featured on Rolling Stone’s list of 200 Best Singers of All Time

The late iconic vocalist Lata Mangeshkar is listed among the 200 greatest singers of all time in the prestigious American publication Rolling Stone. She took the 84th rank on the list, which also includes South Korean singer-songwriter Lee Ji-eun, late Pakistani vocalist Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and Jungkook from the well-known South Korean band BTS.

Talking about Lata Mangeshkar, the magazine penned, “The crystalline, the 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.”

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), the Lata Mangeshkar songbook has influenced music far beyond Bollywood.

Aretha Franklin, a late American singer, was ranked first, followed by Whitney Houston and Sam Cook. The top 10 slots are filled by the following artists: Billie Holiday, Mariah Carey, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Beyonce, Otis Redding, and Al Green.

Among others, the list also has artists like Amy Winehouse, Bruce Springsteen, Taylor Swift, Bono, Michael Jackson, and Billie Eilish.