Bono and Van Morrison represent Ireland on Rolling Stones 200 Greatest Singers list
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Bono and Van Morrison represent Ireland on Rolling Stones 200 Greatest Singers list

Bono and Van Morrison have been listed in Rolling Stone's 200 Greatest Singers of All Time list.

Morrison was ranked in 37th position, while Bono was further back in 140th.

"To experience the height of Van Morrison’s vocal genius, you have to get beyond the words," the publication said about Morrison.

"Zero in on, say, the free-form back half of a 1974 performance of “Listen to the Lion,” where he starts out with honeyed crooning and blissed-out humming, tries out around a dozen different cadences on the word “you” and eventually lets fly with full-on grunts and groans.

"Ever since his early days in Them, on through the overtly mystical years of Astral Weeks and Veedon Fleece, and up to his current incarnation as a gruff R&B songman (yes, with profoundly wrongheaded views on Covid-19 vaccines and lockdowns), he’s always aimed to unify the moans and shouts of his idols like Lead Belly and Ray Charles with a insatiable quest for what Greil Marcus (via Ralph J. Gleason) likes to describe as “the yarragh” — the bedrock truth of a given song."

Bono, meanwhile, was  for pushing his voice to "every extreme".

This list was compiled with staff and key contributors at Rolling Stone, and it encompasses 100 years of pop music "as an ongoing global conversation", where iconic Indian playback singer Lata Mangeshkar lands between Amy Winehouse and Johnny Cash, and salsa queen Celia Cruz is up there in the rankings with Prince and Marvin Gaye.

The list is made up of vocalists who made or continue to make "popular music for the masses" given the magazine's "purview is pop music writ large".

"In all cases, what mattered most to us was originality, influence, the depth of an artist's catalogue, and the breath of their musical legacy," the list's introduction states.

The top twenty singers of all time were listed as follows:

  1. Aretha Franklin
  2. Whitney Houston
  3. Sam Cooke
  4. Billie Holiday
  5. Mariah Carey
  6. Ray Charles
  7. Stevie Wonder
  8. Beyoncé
  9. Otis Redding
  10. Al Green
  11. Little Richard
  12. John Lennon
  13. Patsy Cline
  14. Freddie Mercury
  15. Bob Dylan
  16. Prince
  17. Elvis Presley
  18. Celia Crus
  19. Frank Sinatra
  20. Marvin Gaye