Best Male Singers of the 20th Century

FREDDIE MERCURY!!!!!!!!!!!
His incredible voice, his terriffic range!!!!!!!
Yes, in my opinion he was the best male singer of the 20th Century!!!!!!!!
And he also was a great show-man and composer!

It's difficult to give a meaningful answer to this question, because it's so hard to make a meaningful comparison between popular singers, jazz singers, blues singers, folk singers, rock singers, and opera singers, to say nothing of the difficulty of comparing tenors, baritones, and basses. But given all that, the majority of those who are truly knowledgeable about the human voice and the art of singing, if pressed for an answer to this question, would say that the greatest male singer of the 20th century was Italian tenor Enrico Caruso (born Naples 1873, died Naples 1921), the man whose name became virtually synonymous with great singing. You won't find many who know what they're talking about who would disagree with this judgment. Fortunately for posterity, Caruso made many recordings, all by the acoustic process, and did more than any other single artist to popularize the phonograph (or gramophone) in its early decades.

With no contest, in pop music, the 3 "best" voices are :
Greg Lake, Jon Anderson, Freddy Mercury

Zefox of France

Its Ray Charles, of course!
The single most influential singer of all time.
A great blues singer who kick-started Rock'n'Roll went on to invent Soul and is the inspiration behind ALL of the sixties british bands like the Stones,Beatles,Kinks and the Animals who, in turn, influenced countless american bands. Modern music would be unrecognizable without Ray.
Objectively, he'll be hard to beat.

If it is for singing alone we give this honor then I would vote for Elvis. The Man had an incredible voice which he could and did apply to a number of different genres of music, and with which he did broaden the view of what great singing could be- what vocal styles could be acceptable. That is a lot to do in one century! Still, my favorite bests are the likes of Woody Gutherie and Bob dylan. Captains of the best worst male singers of the twentieth Century catagory to show up here, er, eventually.