Despite having a long and proud history of helping found it (see Sister Rosetta Tharpe, for example), rock and roll remains a boys’ club where women are not welcome. To many men, a woman’s place is offstage, backstage, or maybe shaking a tambourine. Men still have a long way to go regarding giving women equal treatment on the rock and roll stage.
Luckily, women have not been waiting around for men to smarten up and have been excelling on every instrument, including the human voice. There are female singers out there who are easily as good as their male counterparts, if not better, and the only thing that’s been holding them back is male refusal to recognize them. In that spirit, we will do all the dudes a solid and give them this list of excellent female singers who deserve more attention.
Image Credit: Bonnie Raitt by John Edwards/ Flickr (None).
Ann Wilson
The lead singer of Heart has an incredible set of lungs that have been helping her belt out songs like ‘Magic Man’ and ‘Crazy on You’ since the 1970s, and she hasn’t slowed down since.
In 2012, she sang ‘Stairway to Heaven’ at the Kennedy Center in front of the three surviving members of Led Zeppelin, and she crushed it.
Image Credit: Ann Wilson by Frank Schwichtenberg (None).
Bonnie Raitt
Bonnie Raitt is rarely seen without a guitar, which may have slightly overshadowed her singing talents. Rest assured, she has a great, natural voice that makes everything sound effortless. Amusingly, she won a Grammy in 2023 for the song ‘Just Like That,’ beating Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and Lizzo, and most of the paparazzi in attendance had no idea who she was.
Image Credit: Bonnie Raitt by John Edwards/ Flickr (None).
Nina Hagen
Nina Hagen has been associated with the German punk rock movement since the 1970s, but there’s always been much more to her than that. She’s best known in the United States for her song ‘New York/N.Y.,’ a completely bonkers rap-influenced oddity featuring her busting out with a bizarre, angular, operatic voice that sounds like nothing ever.
Image Credit: Nina Hagen by Christliches Medienmagazin pro/ Flickr (None).
Diamanda Galás
Calling Diamanda Galás a rock singer is a little reductive since she’s worked in many styles since she emerged in the 1980s. However, record stores filed her in the “rock” section, and she collaborated with Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones on 1994’s ‘The Sporting Life’ album, so it will have to do. Be warned – while about half her work draws from recognizable musical influences like opera and blues, the other half is jarring, experimental, and not for the faint of heart.
Image Credit: Diamanda Galas by Andy Newcome/ Flickr (None).
PJ Harvey
PJ Harvey burst onto the scene in the early 1990s and was first lumped in with grunge and alternative music, but by the time she made 1995’s ‘To Bring You My Love’ album, she was already on her own very singular musical path. No one sounds like her to this day, and she’s continued to evolve with every record.
Image Credit: PJ Harvey by Dave Mitchell (Plastic Jesus)/ Flickr (None).
Beth Gibbons
The singer for the trip-hop band Portishead, Beth Gibbons has a singing voice that’s spooky and ethereal yet never sounds weak. Our sole complaint with her is that Portishead only made three studio albums, and between that and some collaborations she’s done over the years, there’s not a lot of Beth Gibbons music out there. Hunt it down anyway. It’s worth it.
Image Credit: Beth Gibbons by Bill Ebbesen (None).
Neko Case
Neko Case is one of the best singers working today, period, full stop. She’s been active as a solo artist and a member of groups such as the New Pornographers and the Corn Sisters since the 1990s, but she set herself apart as a country chanteuse in the early 2000s. However, she was never one to stay in one artistic place for very long, and she’s made a lot of exciting music in other styles since then, all of it worth hearing.
Image Credit: Neko Case by Fred von Lohmann/ Flickr (None).
Lana Del Rey
Born Elizabeth Grant, Lana Del Rey first turned up on many people’s radars when she appeared on ‘SNL’ in 2012, in what many people said was the worst musical performance ever in the show’s entire history. She has continued to make her unique brand of orchestral pop nonetheless, and it’s hard to say that anybody else sounds like her, except maybe Julee Cruise.
Image Credit: Lana Del Ray by Harmony Gerber/ Flickr (None).
Deborah Harry
Yes, everyone knows who Deborah Harry is, but the Blondie singer received an outsized amount of attention for her physical looks and her status as a woman in rock. Very little is written about her singing voice, which is uniformly excellent on all the Blondie records and still serviceable today, as videos of her performing at Coachella in 2023 will attest.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Sandy Denny
Sandy Denny is best known for her haunting vocal on Led Zeppelin’s ‘Battle of Evermore,’ but they had asked her to participate based on the strength of her work with Fairport Convention, a British folk-rock band. She went solo in 1971, and her records from that decade are uniformly brilliant. Sadly, Denny died at 31 from a brain hemorrhage after what many speculated was a fall down a flight of stairs while she was alone at home.
This article was produced and syndicated by MediaFeed.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
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