Women of World Music

By Chris Nickson, eMusic Contributor

Good -- even great -- singers are everywhere. But true icons are very few and far between. Icons can sing gloriously, but they do something more; they speak for their people, transmitting their hopes and fears, their histories and their futures. The women here are icons. Most of them developed their art over decades, many of them suffered deprivation and exile, or a hard life before they found fame, like the bordello upbringing of Edith Piaf.… more »