When I’m happy I live it, I don’t sing it, but when I feel pain, the only way I can get that out is to sing it,” Bonnie Raitt explained to an interviewer in 1975. His voice is so tough and so masculine," says Alison Krauss, who grew up a big fan of Paul Rodgers, "he might as well be standing there with a gun while he's singing. There is no voice in rock like Reed's: a confrontational blend of dry intonation and hard New York-native attitude that suited the dark, frank songs he wrote about sex, drugs and lost souls for the Velvet Underground and on a lifetime of provocative solo albums.

In an era when lots of indie-rock guys were trying to channel heartland disaffection by singing like they’d lived through the Dust Bowl, Westerberg put no distance at all between his own voice and the world of broken suburban kids he ached to redeem. you carry yourself,” every pause infused with a lifetime of observation and regret; it’s a vocal masterclass. There was a gravity to his tone — with his shades, the suit — but there was also this impish, elfin quality, and you could hear it when he laughed, which he did a lot onstage because he enjoyed playing so much. Official ratings are taken from BARB, utilising the four-screen dashboard which includes viewers who watched the programme on laptops, smartphones, and tablets within 28 days of the original broadcast. Lucha Reyes, whose songs are still heard in the bustling streets of Lima, paved the way for black female solo artists in Peru.

She approaches singing with impressive seriousness and does not like to improvise: When it came time to record the rocking coda ("I got to go…") to "Midnight Train," her brother, Bubba, who was one of her famed support group, the Pips, sang the parts live into her headphones, and she delivered them in her own inimitable style.

With his throaty, impeccably controlled roar, Rodgers was born to sing over big guitars — which he did again and again, most notably with pioneering rockers Free and the Seventies hitmaking machine Bad Company. As an 11-year-old, in 1956, she tore into Hank Williams’ “Jambalaya (On the Bayou),” showing off an already-polished blend of bubblegum sweetness and growling intensity that she’d channel into early hits like “That’s All You Gotta Do” and “Dum Dum. Summoned through belly, hammered into form by the throat, given propulsion by bellows of lungs, teased into final form by tongue and lips, a vocal is a kind of audible kiss, a blurted confession, a soul-burp you really can’t keep from issuing as you make your way through the material world. Photograph: Archive of Javier Ponce Gambirazio Lucha Reyes, whose songs are still heard in the bustling streets of Lima, paved the way for black female solo artists in Peru.Censored at home and forced into exile during Argentina’s dictatorship of the late 1970s, Sosa became an international concert attraction, beaming onstage like a South American Mother Earth. His attempts would produce aching ballads like "Maggie May" and "Tonight's the Night (Gonna Be Alright)," as well as Stones-like rockers such as "Stay With Me" (with the Faces) and "Hot Legs. Years later, that rasp in his fluid tenor voice would convey a world-weariness that defined Eagles classics such as "Hotel California" from 1976 and solo tunes like "The Boys of Summer" from 1984. It didn’t matter if it was classic country balladry (“Fool Hearted Memory”), slyly horny two-step (“The Fireman”), western swing (“Right or Wrong”), or honky-tonk (“All My Ex’s Live in Texas),” he sounded right at home doing it all. Their hits in the Fifties and early Sixties seemed at once raw and pristine: When he first heard the Everlys, Art Garfunkel says, "I learned that every syllable can shine.