In western art song and opera, voices like those of Kathleen Ferrier, Luciano Pavarotti or Maria Callas have the capacity to leap out from the score to touch anyone who has ever heard their unique sound. There have always been certain singing voices that seem to reach out and speak to something beyond most of the others. Some great voices do this, in part, because their distinctiveness is intimately associated with some large moral cause: Paul Robeson with racial justice or Joan Baez with civil rights, for example. Others achieve their connection by representing the zenith of a particular cultural tradition: Umm Kulthum in Egypt, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in Pakistan or Youssou N'Dour in Senegal. Still others uniquely embody a time and place in their art: John McCormack with early 20th-century Ireland, perhaps, or Édith Piaf with postwar Paris. In 20th-century pop music, the voice of Elvis Presley is as iconic and identifiable in the west as that of Teresa Teng – whose voice was memorably described as “seven parts sweetness, three parts tears” – is in the east. No list of examples will be exhaustive. There are, it goes without saying, many others. Yet when Rolling Stone selected Aretha Franklin as the greatest popular singer of all time, we all understood why.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "In western art song and opera, voices like those of Kathleen Ferrier, Luciano Pavarotti or Maria Callas have the capacity to leap out from the score to touch anyone who has ever heard their unique sound. There have always been certain singing voices that seem to reach out and speak to something beyond most of the others. Some great voices do this, in part, because their distinctiveness is intimately associated with some large moral cause: Paul Robeson with racial justice or Joan Baez with civil rights, for example. Others achieve their connection by representing the zenith of a particular cultural tradition: Umm Kulthum in Egypt, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in Pakistan or Youssou N'Dour in Senegal. Still others uniquely embody a time and place in their art: John McCormack with early 20th-century Ireland, perhaps, or Édith Piaf with postwar Paris. In 20th-century pop music, the voice of Elvis Presley is as iconic and identifiable in the west as that of Teresa Teng – whose voice was memorably described as “seven parts sweetness, three parts tears” – is in the east. No list of examples will be exhaustive. There are, it goes without saying, many others. Yet when Rolling Stone selected Aretha Franklin as the greatest popular singer of all time, we all understood why." in the context of "The Guardian's laud of Aretha Franklin, in an editorial published on the day after her death and entitled "The Guardian view on the secret of singing: whatever it is, Aretha knew it!"" to mean that wisdom is timeless.