Sister Rosetta Tharpe
Sister Rosetta Tharpe was an American gospel singer whose music crossed over into rock and roll and rhythm and blues. She was one of the first popular musicians to use distortion on her guitar and would play electric guitar to accompany her gospel singing.
She was a huge influence on rock and roll musicians of the 1950s and 1960s. Without Sister Rosetta there wouldn’t have been the Elvis we know today, who drew huge influence from her work and performers like Little Richard and Johnny Cash described her as their favourite singer.
Oh, these kids and rock and roll — this is just sped up rhythm and blues. I've been doing that forever.
Ella Fitzgerald
Singer and songwriter Ella Fitzgerald had such an impact on music that she is often referred to as the first lady of song.
Her vocal talent made her a star and her work as a civil rights activist made her a historical figure. She first saw success performing with the Chick Webb Orchestra, before beginning a solo career in 1942.
She is perhaps best known for her versions of The Great American Songbook, and she also went on to appear on film and TV.
She faced discrimination throughout her career. In the 1940s Norman Granz, a jazz promoter, arranged the Jazz at the Philharmonic tour with Ella at the helm. The shows specifically targeted segregated venues, with Norman ensuring that they were desegregated for the shows.
She was awarded America’s highest non-military award the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Image courtesy of the Fraser MacPherson estate Guy MacPherson Creative Commons 2.0
Sophie
Sophie was a music producer, DJ and songwriter who worked with artists including Charli XCX and Madonna as well as making her own electronic music.
For much of her career Sophie kept her identity hidden, not appearing on camera and masking her voice in interviews, before coming out as transgender in 2017. In 2021 she died aged 34 after falling from a balcony.
She has been described as a pioneer of the hyperpop microgenre and her brother posthumously released her second album in 2024.
Rosabel Watson
Rosabel Watson was a musician and conductor described in Etude Magazine as ‘the best woman horn-player in England’. She established the Aeolian Ladies’ Orchestra in 1886, thought to be the first women only orchestra in the UK.
The orchestra toured nationally and performed at many suffrage gatherings.
In the 20th century, she became an authority on music for Shakespearean productions, selecting, arranging and composing music for productions of Shakespeare plays for the Royal Shakespeare Company and Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre.
Sylvia Robinson
Sylvia Robinson was a singer and record producer. While some may remember her from the songs ‘Love is Strange’ and ‘Shame, Shame, Shame’, she is most well known as the founder and CEO of Sugar Hill Records.
This pioneering label was instrumental to the era of commercial hip-hop and Sylvia produced songs including Rappers Delight by the Sugar Hill Gang, and The Message by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five with fellow producer Melle Mel. The Message is cited as the greatest hip hop songs of all time.
She has been described as the ‘mother of hip-hop’.
Annie Nightingale
Annie Nightingale was the first female DJ on BBC Radio 1, joining the station in 1970. She championed new and undiscovered artists and music, as well as encouraging more women to become DJs and broadcasters, something incredibly rare at the time.
When BBC Radio 1 was first established in 1967 producers decided only male DJs would be on air. Annie applied persistently for three years, finally being given an audition when The Beatles offered their support.
In 2010 she was awarded a Guinness World Record for the longest career as a female radio presenter.
Nina Simone
Nina Simone’s blend of jazz, classical, blues and gospel, her soulful voice and her huge repertoire of songs all make her one of the greatest artists of the 20th century.
She recorded more than 40 albums and used her music to confront racial injustice. She became one of the key voices in the Civil Rights Movement.
Nina performed benefit concerts for racial equality groups and released the protest song ‘Mississippi Goddamn’ in 1964. The song was written in response to the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham Alabama and assassination of civil rights leader Medgar Evers.
She felt that she was labelled a jazz singer due to her race and identified more as a folk-singer. Nina had a background in classical music that remained a key tenet of her song writing and her performance throughout her career.
Known for her temper, she would leave the stage mid performance if she didn’t feel her audience were being respectful or quiet enough.
She is loved or feared, adored or disliked, but few who have met her music or glimpsed her soul react with moderation.
Lauryn Hill
Lauryn Hill is one of the most influential artists of her generation. Starting her music career in The Fugees, she continually broke down barriers for female rappers.
Her first solo album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, was the first number one album by a solo female rapper and debuted at the top of the Billboard 200.
Lauryn Hill was the first rapper to appear on the cover of Time Magazine and she is credited with blending rap and melodic singing, bringing hip-hop and R&B together.
Hill is to hip-hop as a gardener is to soil
Sona Jobarteh
Sona Jobarteh is a Gambian-British musician who was born into a griot family. Griot is a tradition of storytellers, singers and poets from West Africa. She is the first woman to come from the tradition to become a kora virtuoso.
The playing of kora is traditionally passed down from father to son but Sona has revolutionised this male-dominated tradition. The kora is an important element of the mandingo peoples in West Africa, and playing it is only for griot families.
She was taught to play this stringed instrument by her brother and has since played with numerous orchestras and composed film scores.
Sinead O’Connor
Sinead O’ Connor was an Irish singer-songwriter, record producer and activist. She achieved huge chart success at a young age and used her platform to draw attention to child abuse, human rights, racism and women’s rights.
Her most popular song ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ was the top world single at the Billboard Music Awards in 1990.
She caused particular controversy when she tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II while performing on Saturday Night Live in 1992. She asked the audience to ‘fight the real enemy’, drawing attention to the sexual abuse in the Catholic church – this was nearly a decade before the full extent of that abuse was revealed to the world.
In the same year she was named the most influential women by Time Magazine.
In 1991 she was nominated for four Grammys, winning one but refusing to attend the ceremony to collect it. She instead wrote an open letter to the recording academy stating that it prioritised materialistic values over artistic merit.
Maria Callas
Maria Callas was one of the most influential operatic sopranos of the 20th century, whose musicality is defined by her ‘bel canto’ style. She had a huge vocal range, with Leonard Bernstein describing her as ‘the bible of opera’.
There are three aspects of Maria Callas’s story which typify the increased pressure and difficulty women face compared to their male counterparts.
Like all groundbreaking women, her life was commented on and gossiped about by the media. She was known for her temper, and for a well-known rivalry with Italian lyrico spinto soprano Renata Tebaldi. Between 1953 and 1954 she lost 36kg, something which is thought to have contributed to her voice faltering in later life. Rumours and gossip abounded about the way in which she lost the weight.
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Dame Evelyn Glennie
Evelyn Glennie is the first woman, and first deaf person, to make a career through playing percussion instruments. She started to lose her hearing at the age of eight and is profoundly deaf.
She plays music barefoot in order to feel the music and vibrations of her instruments. She has described listening to them with other parts of her body.[CC1]
In 2012 she performed at the Olympic Opening Ceremony in London and in 2015 she was named as one of two laureates for the Polar Music Prize.
Dame Evelyn Glennie is also a Horniman ambassador.
Florence Price
Florence Price is considered to be the first African American woman to be a symphonic composer, and the first to have a composition played by a major orchestra.
Born in little rock, Arkansas in 1887, she moved to Chicago with her husband and children after series of racially motivated hate crimes in Arkansas.
She composed over 300 works including symphonies, concertos, chamber music and music for solo instruments.
In her lifetime she faced the dual prejudice from being both black and a woman at a time when neither were common in music, particularly in orchestral music.
Nadia Boulanger
Nadia Boulanger was a composer and conductor in Paris who taught many of the leading composers and musicians of the 20th century.
She was the first woman to conduct many orchestras across the world including the BBC Symphony and Philadelphia Orchestras.
As a teacher Nadia accepted pupils from any and all backgrounds, as long as they had a willingness to learn.
Anyone who acts without paying attention to what he is doing is wasting his life. I'd go so far as to say that life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece.
Joni Mitchell
Joni Mitchell is considered one of the greatest songwriters of all time, and her expansive career has seen her produce and co-produce almost all of her albums, and design all of her own album covers.
She became a folk singer and songwriter at a time when the musical landscape was dominated by men.
Her songs offer a way into the world of everyday people.
At the age of nine she had polio, which weakened her left hand. Because of this she found workarounds when learning and playing guitar, leading to her use of alternative harmonies and non-standard tuning.
In the 1960s she gave birth to a baby girl who she could not look after and so she was put up for adoption. They reunited in adulthood and Joni has said that the moment when she could not look after her child was the beginning of her inspiration for song writing.
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Sha-Rock
Sha-Rock, also known as MC Sha-Rock was a ground-breaking person in the hip-hop community. She is often considered to be the first female rapper.
As part of the band Funky 4 + 1 she was the ‘+1’ who was named ‘mother of the mic’. The band was one of the first hip-hop crews to appear on national television.
Siouxsie Sioux
Coming to prominence as the lead singer of the band Siouxsie and the Banshees, Siouxsie Soux was a hugely influential singer, lyricist, and pioneer of the punk and DIY movements.
Many of her songs were about the damage caused to her by her tumultuous childhood. Her father was an alcoholic, and died of an alcoholism-related illness when she was 14.
Siouxsie has had a huge influence on a wide range of acts, from Radiohead to Joy Division, The xx to PJ Harvey.
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