Ten voices, from the opera house to the stadium, that taught a hundred years how to sing.

No century changed singing the way the 20th did. When it opened, a voice could only travel as far as the back row of a theater; by its close, a single performance could reach nearly two billion people at once. The gramophone, the microphone, radio, and television did not just carry voices further, they changed what a voice could be. Intimacy became an instrument. A whisper could fill a stadium. And a handful of singers understood, sooner and more completely than anyone else, what these new machines made possible.

This list is the flagship of our Icons series, so it ranges across the whole century and every genre, from verismo opera to soul, salsa, chanson, and arena rock. We chose influence over fame: each of these ten changed how singing itself was done, not merely how many records were sold. Together they span continents, styles, and generations, and at least one or two should be genuine discoveries. They appear in no particular order.

1. Enrico Caruso

1873-1921

The Neapolitan tenor was the first singer to grasp that the gramophone was not a toy but a stage. His 1907 recording of “Vesti la giubba” from Pagliacci is widely credited as the first record to sell a million copies, and it made him the first global recording star in any genre. For nearly two decades he reigned at New York’s Metropolitan Opera while his discs carried his warm, baritonal tenor into living rooms that had never seen an opera house. Every recording career of the past hundred years descends from his. Start with that 1907 “Vesti la giubba”: the crackle falls away within seconds.

2. Umm Kulthum

Star of the East

For much of the century the most listened-to singer on earth was not American or European but Egyptian. Umm Kulthum’s live radio concerts, broadcast on the first Thursday of each month, famously brought streets across the Arab world to a standstill, and a single song could unfold for an hour as she improvised on a line until the audience demanded it again. She fused classical Arabic poetry with an emotional directness no one has matched, and when she died in 1975 her funeral in Cairo drew a crowd estimated in the millions. Start with “Enta Omri” from 1964, her celebrated first collaboration with composer Mohammed Abdel Wahab.

3. Billie Holiday

1915-1959

Holiday sang behind the beat, bent notes like a horn player, and proved that a small, worn voice could carry more truth than a flawless one. Her phrasing rewired jazz singing so thoroughly that nearly every vocalist since, in any popular genre, owes her something. In 1939 she recorded “Strange Fruit,” a searing protest against lynching that her own label refused to touch, turning a song into an act of political courage decades before that was common. Start there, then sit with the ravaged late beauty of the 1958 album Lady in Satin.

4. Édith Piaf

The Little Sparrow

Discovered singing on the streets of Paris, Piaf stood well under five feet tall and sang as if her life depended on the next phrase, because it often had. She made French chanson a world language of heartbreak, treating each song as a three-minute drama delivered without ornament or apology. She also wrote the lyrics to her own signature, “La Vie en rose,” a rarity for a woman in 1940s popular music. Start with that song, then hear “Non, je ne regrette rien” from 1960, defiance compressed into two astonishing minutes.

5. Frank Sinatra

1915-1998

Sinatra turned the microphone from a piece of equipment into an instrument, singing to millions as if to one person across a table. He studied the seamless breathing of Tommy Dorsey’s trombone and built from it a legato line that made lyrics sound like confession. With In the Wee Small Hours in 1955, a suite of songs unified by late-night desolation, he helped invent the concept album and made the long-playing record an artistic form rather than a container. Start with that album, ideally after midnight, as intended.

6. Maria Callas

La Divina

Callas restored drama to opera at a moment when beautiful tone had become an end in itself. She was willing to make an ugly sound if the character demanded it, and her performances at La Scala in the 1950s led the revival of neglected bel canto operas by Bellini, Donizetti, and their contemporaries, works now standard repertory largely because she proved they could grip a modern audience. Singers still study her recordings the way actors study film of the great stage performers. Start with the 1953 EMI Tosca conducted by Victor de Sabata, still routinely named the greatest opera recording ever made.

7. Elvis Presley

1935-1977

On a July night in 1954 at Sun Studio in Memphis, a nineteen-year-old truck driver tore into “That’s All Right” and popular music split into before and after. Presley fused gospel fervor, blues phrasing, and country twang into a sound that made teenagers a cultural force and put the body back into singing. Within two years “Heartbreak Hotel” gave him his first national number one, and television carried the revolution into every American home. Start with the Sun sessions, where the sound of rock and roll being discovered is audible in real time.

8. Aretha Franklin

The Queen of Soul

Franklin brought the full power of the Black church into popular music and, in doing so, gave the era its conscience a voice. Her 1967 recording of “Respect” transformed Otis Redding’s song into an anthem of both feminism and civil rights, one of the rare records that genuinely changed what a hit could mean. In 1987 she became the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Start with “Respect,” then go to Amazing Grace, the 1972 church recording that became the best-selling live gospel album of all time.

9. Celia Cruz

The Queen of Salsa

Havana-born Cruz rose to fame in the 1950s fronting La Sonora Matancera, left Cuba in 1960 never to return, and then conquered a second century of her own in exile. In 1970s New York she became the defining voice of salsa alongside the Fania All-Stars, a woman commanding a genre run almost entirely by men, her battle cry of “¡Azúcar!” ringing out over the horns. She made Afro-Cuban music a global language and sang joy as an act of resistance. Start with “La Vida Es Un Carnaval” from 1998, proof that at seventy-three she could still set a room dancing.

10. Freddie Mercury

1946-1991

Born Farrokh Bulsara in Zanzibar, Mercury made the rock stadium his opera house. With Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” in 1975 he collapsed the wall between opera and rock in a single six-minute single that spent nine weeks at number one in Britain. On stage he turned tens of thousands of strangers into a choir, never more completely than in Queen’s twenty-minute set at Live Aid in 1985, often called the greatest live performance in rock history. Start with that Wembley footage and watch one voice hold a global broadcast in the palm of its hand.

Final thoughts

What unites these ten is not a sound but an instinct. Each understood the technology and the moment they were given, whether a wax cylinder, a radio tower, a ribbon microphone, or a satellite feed, and used it to get closer to the listener than any singer had before. The 20th century turned singing from a local art into a planetary one, and these were the voices that drew the map: opera and salsa, chanson and soul, the Cairo radio concert and the Memphis studio, each proving in its own language that a voice could carry a whole culture inside it.

Any list this size leaves giants at the door. Ella Fitzgerald, whose songbook albums made the American popular canon a permanent art form, and Luciano Pavarotti, who carried opera to football stadiums at the century’s end, both nearly claimed a place here, and either would headline a narrower list without argument. Take these ten as a starting chorus rather than a verdict, and if one voice is new to you, follow it: that is the whole point of this series. You can explore how music and performance shaped the wider culture in our pillar guides across CreARTivity.