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Aretha Franklin “best female singer” list without Celine Dion
The American soul singer Aretha Franklin during a performance in Detroit (archive photo). photo
© Jeff Kowalsky/epa/dpa
Rolling Stone magazine has named Aretha Franklin the best singer of all time. Canadian Celine Dion surprisingly didn’t make the list.
US soul singer Aretha Franklin (76, “Respect”) leads the current list of the best singers of all time in the music magazine “Rolling Stone”. So far, so understandable.
On the other hand, it caused much more astonishment that the five-time Grammy winner Celine Dion did not even make it into the top 200. “With all due respect, not including Celine Dion, arguably the greatest vocal technician of all time, on this list is tantamount to treason,” music producer Jamie Lambert wrote on Twitter. The British newspaper Daily Mail said: “There are no big surprises in the top ten on the Rolling Stone list, apart from the fact that Dion was overlooked.” The 54-year-old initially did not comment on this.
At the start of the new year, the newspaper published an updated list of the “200 greatest singers of all time”. R&B star Whitney Houston and soul pioneer Sam Cooke, who sang one of the most important songs of the US civil rights movement with “A Change is Gonna Come”, took second and third place.
Rolling Stone first published a list of the 100 greatest singers in 2008. The authors wrote: “Before you start reading (and commenting), please remember that this is the list of the greatest singers, not the list of the greatest voices.” Other well-known musicians who didn’t make the list include Dionne Warwick, Diana Ross and Sting.