The artist Roger Daltrey called the greatest rock singer of all time: “The best virtuoso rock ‘n’ roll singer”
According to Roger Daltrey, the true “art” of rock is vocal versatility.
When we look at some of the greatest vocalists in rock history, that’s a common theme. Which is a simple way of describing someone who can transition seamlessly between different vocal dynamics and styles and still hit where it matters, still land somewhere resonant, making you wonder how on earth they ever managed to learn something so mind-blowingly ethereal.
When we think of the ultimate rock voices, there are really only a handful of names that immediately come to mind. Countless rock voices deserve attention, but the usual suspects are the ones that we constantly come back to for a reason. Usually, they’re ones with immense range and dynamic diversity, like Robert Plant, who’s widely considered the best of the best when it comes to emotion and intensity.
Others, like Chris Cornell, are also considered the pinnacle of rock vocals. Cornell, in particular, provided the blueprint for many, learning all about being both icy and warm from other vocal forces like Nick Drake and inspiring an entire generation of rock singers to greatness. As James Hetfield once said, with Cornell, it was his intelligent interplay with different dynamics that set Metallica on a path to their own self-discovery with vocals and arrangements.
For many, being a good rock singer has nothing to do with range but wit, which is also why many consider someone like Mick Jagger or Iggy Pop or David Bowie to be the ultimate embodiment of the rock frontman, where it’s often about their ability to contort the voice and sway between different elements of energy and emotion to tell a story or incite a reaction on stage.
However, sometimes, it’s about much more than that, which is incidentally why there’s also one name that comes to most people’s minds when trying to pinpoint the ultimate voice in rock, and that’s the force himself, Freddie Mercury.
Mercury wasn’t just an impressive voice, he also had a natural ability to float between softer, more sultry registers and raw, intense belting, with a natural baritone note that more often went into tenor and up into soprano, making him one of the most diverse and versatile voices that ever existed. Mercury’s voice was often a powerful instrument itself, leading the charge in any setting with all else following second.
According to Daltrey and countless others, Mercury was the peak of vocal ability in rock, someone who could pretty much do anything with his voice and not even break a sweat. As Daltrey once put it, “When we lost Freddie, we not only lost a great personality, a man with a great sense of humour, a true showman, but we lost probably the best, the best virtuoso rock ‘n’ roll singer of all time. He could sing anything in any style. He could change his style from line to line and, God, that’s an art. And he was brilliant at it.”
The “art” that Daltrey addresses isn’t just Mercury’s vocal talent. It’s also the way he felt larger than life on stage, his presence alone feeling like an explosion of energy in itself, a palpable exchange of energy between himself and the audience, the kind of “showman” that could never simply be reduced to a range of octaves or any other quantifiable measurement. Mercury was, to many, pure magic, his voice a conduit for a legacy that would never, ever be replicated.
