There’s something about a voice that’s personal, not unlike the particular odour or shape of a given human body. 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 you really can’t keep from issuing as you make your way through the material world.

The beauty of the singer’s voice touches us in a place that’s as personal as the place from which that voice has issued. If one of the weird things about singers is the ecstasy of surrender they inspire, another weird thing is the debunking response a singer can arouse once we’ve recovered our senses.

If a vocal performance that tenderises our hearts is a kind of high-wire walk, an act both breathtaking and preposterous, we can reassure ourselves that Neil Young or Gillian Welch or Joe Strummer have at least dug the foundations for the poles and strung the wire themselves. Singers reliant on existing or made-to-fit material, such as Janis Joplin, Whitney Houston or Roger Daltrey, might just be birds alighting on someone else’s wire. Listening to them, we may derive a certain thrill from wondering if they find the same meaning in the lyrics they’re putting across that the lyrics’ writer intended, or any meaning at all.

This points to what defines great singing in the rock-and-soul era: that some underlying tension exists in the space between singer and song. A bridge is being built across a void, and it’s a bridge we’re never sure the singer’s going to manage to cross. The gulf may reside between vocal texture and the actual meaning of the words, or between the singer and band, musical genre, style of production or the audience’s expectations. The simplest example comes at the moment of the style’s inception, ie, Elvis Presley: at first, listeners thought that the white guy was a black guy. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that when Ed Sullivan’s television show tossed this disjunction into everyone’s living rooms, American culture was thrilled by it but also a little deranged, in ways it hasn’t got over.

Ultimately, the nature of the vocals in post-Elvis, post-Sam Cooke, post-Ray Charles popular music is the same as the role of the instrumental soloist in jazz. If it isn’t pushing against the boundaries of its form, it isn’t doing anything at all. Etta James, Ray Davies, Mama Cass, Mark Kozelek, Levi Stubbs Jr – these might not all seem like protest singers, but they are always singing against something; whether in themselves, in the band backing them, in the world they live in or the material they’ve been given.

We judge pre-rock singing by how perfectly the lyric is served. That’s the standard Frank Sinatra exemplified. We judge popular vocals since 1956 by what the singer unearths that the song itself could never quite. It explains why voices such as Joan Baez or Emmylou Harris or Billy Joel never really seem to be singing in the contemporary idiom, no matter how much they roughen up their material or accompaniment, and why Elvis – or Dylan – is always rock, even singing Blue Moon. It also explains precisely why such virtuosic pipes as Aretha Franklin’s – or, yes, Karen Carpenter’s – function in the new tradition. No lyric written by them or anyone else could ever express what their voices needed to, and they weren’t going to wait for the instrumental solo, or for the flourish of strings, to put it across for them. They got it into their voice, and their voices got it out into the air, and from there it passed into our bodies.

HOW THE VOTES WERE CAST

Rolling Stone magazine assembled a panel of 179 judges from the ranks of musicians and singers, record company executives and music industry insiders, journalists and Rolling Stone staff. Each voter was asked to list his or her 20 favourite vocalists from the rock era, in order of their importance. Those ballots were recorded and weighted according to methodology developed by the accounting firm of Ernst & Young, which then tabulated and verified the results for Rolling Stone magazine. Jonathan Lethem

THE TOP 10

1 ARETHA FRANKLIN by Mary J. Blige

You know a force from heaven. You know something that God made. And Aretha is a gift from God. When it comes to expressing yourself through song, there is no one who can touch her. She is the reason why women want to sing.

Aretha has everything – the power, the technique. She is honest with everything she says. Everything she’s thinking or dealing with is all in the music, from Chain of Fools to Respect to her live performances. And she has total confidence; she does not waver at all. I think her gospel base brings that confidence, because in gospel they do not play around – they’re all about chops. This is no game to her.

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