For all of the great songs that Elton John gave to the world, it’s easy to overlook the fantastic vocals that he put on every track.
He didn’t see himself as the singing type when he started writing with Bernie Taupin, but after no one took to his songs when he was starting out, he transformed himself into one of the most versatile vocalists of his generation. But even if he put a lot of gravel in his voice and sang a gripping ballad all within the span of one album, he was only imitating the kind of artists that were singing what was in their hearts every single time they got up onstage.
After all, the singer-songwriter generation was all about keeping things as authentic as possible, and John was still an earnest songwriter underneath all of the oversized glasses. His heroes were still people like Bob Dylan, Cat Stevens and Laura Nyro, only this time dressed up with some of the most glamorous fashion choices this side of Liberace and Liza Minnelli. It was a brave stance to take back in the day, but all of John’s favourite singers were about taking a few risks.
Little Richard didn’t go out onstage with the hopes of being accepted with open arms, and chances are Elvis Presley knew he was going to cause a stir when he started shaking his ass for the first time. This was looked at as dangerous for middle America when rock and roll first reared its head, but if you thought that the rock and roll artists had it rough, it was nothing compared to the R&B singers.
Despite being some of the greatest in their field, everyone from Marvin Gaye to Sam Cooke had to fight tooth and nail to be remembered by white audiences. The racial divide was a lot more pronounced back in the day, but whereas most of them tried their best to dress up their music to be acceptable, Nina Simone wasn’t going to budge for a second. She stood her ground and, in the process, made some of the finest music that the R&B world had ever seen.
John had already been used to listening to some of the greatest artists to come out of Motown like Stevie Wonder, but Simone was something entirely different. The British piano man might have been trying to push the envelope a little bit further whenever he went onstage wearing something outrageous, but with only her voice, a piano, and a microphone, Simone showed him what true musical perfection could look like.
And even looking back, John figured that no other female artist had ever compared to what Simone did, saying, “She was a great, classically trained pianist; she wrote songs like ‘Mississippi Goddam’ and ‘To Be Young, Gifted and Black’ at a time when these songs needed to be written; she recorded songs by the Beatles and Jacques Brel. She had an unsurpassed range. Speaking as a musician and as a songwriter, I think she was the greatest female artist of the 20th century.”
There are certainly great female artists who have come after her, but they’re always going to be following in the footsteps of what Simone did. Joni Mitchell, for example, made some of the most gripping pop music that the world had ever heard on records like Court and Spark, but even with all of those strange chords that she threw into the mix, Simone was somewhere in between her and Billie Holiday whenever she sang her songs.
She had a lot of finesse in her delivery, but rarely could anyone sing and make people think that they were hearing a piece of musical history. It wasn’t a case of trying to be better than everyone else, but by staying true to her favourite music and saying what was on her mind, Simone has reached a point where she feels more like a mythical character these days than an actual singer.