Kishore Kumar

Kishore Kumar arrived in Bombay in the late 1940s trailing his star brother Ashok Kumar, and by his own account the real draw was someone else: "I thought he could introduce me to K.L. Saigal, who was my greatest idol," he told the journalist Pritish Nandy in a 1985 interview. He imitated that grieving, classically shaded baritone on his earliest film songs before finding his own voice — and decades later, offered a fortune to record an album of Saigal covers, he refused outright: "Let him remain enshrined in our memory," he said, "let not even one person say that Kishore Kumar sang them better."

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1946

Jab Dil Hi Toot GayaK. L. Saigal

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1961

Koi Humdam Na RahaKishore Kumar

listen forPlay Saigal's "Jab Dil Hi Toot Gaya" against Kishore's "Koi Humdam Na Raha" (1961) and the debt sits in the grain before the phrasing — both voices settle into a raga-rooted melancholy, holding a note low and letting it waver rather than snapping it clean. Kishore had already built out his yodel and his comic range by then, but strip those away in a slow lament and the singer who once imitated Saigal note for note is still audible underneath.

His brother Anoop Kumar had brought home records of Alpine yodeling from a trip abroad, and Kishore taught himself the technique alone in the bathroom, working from Jimmie Rodgers and the Australian singer Tex Morton until, by Wikipedia's account, it became "an essential feature of his singing." No one had built a technique from the American "Blue Yodeler" into Hindi cinema before him; the music-education platform Artium Academy later put it plainly: "it was Jimmie Rodgers who popularised Yodeling, and in India, it was Kishore Kumar who introduced yodelling in Hindi Films."

listen: upstream & heresource: Artium Academy — Top 10 Kishore Kumar Songs (Jimmie Rodgers and yodeling's introduction to Hindi film music) ↗share

1927

Blue Yodel No. 1 (T for Texas)Jimmie Rodgers

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1971

Zindagi Ek Safar Hai SuhanaKishore Kumar

listen forRodgers breaks "Blue Yodel No. 1" open on the word "blues," snapping from chest voice into a high, yipping falsetto and back inside a single breath. Kishore does the identical maneuver in "Zindagi Ek Safar Hai Suhana," sailing out of a conversational verse into that same Alpine whoop before dropping back to the melody — a technique built for a Mississippi train song, repurposed forty years later for a Bollywood road trip.

During the making of 1950's Mashaal, S.D. Burman overheard Kishore giving a note-perfect K.L. Saigal impression at brother Ashok's house. Wikipedia's account of the encounter records that Burman complimented him, then told him "he should develop a style of his own, instead of copying Saigal." Burman kept faith with that advice for two decades, casting Kishore's voice across Dev Anand's films through the 1950s and 60s and then, in 1969, handing him three songs in Aradhana — among them "Roop Tera Mastana," which won Kishore his first Filmfare Award and set the singer he'd once redirected atop the industry.

listen: upstream & heresource: Wikipedia — Kishore Kumar (biography, career trajectory, the Mashaal/S.D. Burman encounter, yodeling influences) ↗share

1959

Sun Mere Bandhu ReS.D. Burman

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1969

Roop Tera MastanaKishore Kumar

listen forBurman sang so rarely himself that "Sun Mere Bandhu Re" — his own rough-hewn, boatman's-call recording for 1959's Sujata — is a rare direct record of the earthy, folk-rooted voice his songs were built around. A decade later, writing for Kishore in Aradhana, he asked for something else: an easy, unforced, conversational croon with none of the strain of an impression. "Roop Tera Mastana" is that instruction made audible — the natural voice Burman had pushed Kishore toward two decades earlier, finally given a hit to prove it.