Petula Clark at the Big TNT Show
Maybe the best white female pop singer of the second half of the ’60s
PICKING THE BEST female vocalist in pop music during the ’60s shouldn’t be that hard: if you don’t immediately think “Aretha” you’re probably not thinking at all. For artistic and commercial success, influence, and the sheer power of her pipes, she’s the one to beat. But there’s at least one other singer who could belt out a song as good as Aretha, if not quite in the soulful manner that rock historians and Rock & Roll Hall of Fame voters favor, and that was Petula Clark.
In fact, if we differentiate pop music as a genre from soul music, then Pet Clark may have been the best female pop singer of the second half of that decade!
For many of us, the term pop music is just fine, but for the aforementioned historians and voters, it is often a damning label. While it is easy to assess Clark as a pop singer, from at least 1965 on she was not at all like the pop singers of the pre-rock & roll era.
In the as-yet-unpublished chapter on 1965 in our “Toppermost of the Poppermost” series here on Medium, John Ross offers a definition of rock & roll that includes “any record that could not have been conceived, let alone made, before 1955. ‘Downtown,’ as it exists, in all its sweep and grandeur, could not have…
