Van Morrison beats stiff competition to score highly on Rolling Stone's list of the '200 Greatest Singers of All Time'

Van Morrison has been named one of the 'Greatest Singers of All Time' by the prestigious music bible Rolling Stone.

This year, the ever-popular music magazine decided to revisit their '100 Greatest Singers' article written in 2008 and double the talent by creating a new list compiled by staff and key contributors to encompass 100 years of pop music.

The Belfast singer not only featured on the list of history's 200 greatest singers, but he also makes his mark in the top 50 - coming in at number 37.

Rolling Stone said: "In all cases, what mattered most to us was originality, influence, the depth of an artist’s catalogue, and the breadth of their musical legacy.

"A voice can be gorgeous like Mariah Carey’s, rugged like Toots Hibbert’s, understated like Willie Nelson’s, slippery and sumptuous like D’Angelo’s, or bracing like Bob Dylan’s.

"But in the end, the singers behind it are here for one reason: They can remake the world just by opening their mouths."

Van the Man beat out a number of other influential performers such as Elton John (ranked at 100), Michael Jackson (ranked at 86) and Stevie Nicks (ranked at number 93).

Rolling Stone continued in its flattering appraisal of one of Northern Ireland’s most famous musical exports: "To experience the height of Van Morrison’s vocal genius, you have to get beyond the words. "Zero in on, say, the free-form back half of a 1974 performance of 'Listen to the Lion', where he starts out with honeyed crooning and blissed-out humming, tries out around a dozen different cadences on the word 'you' and eventually lets fly with full-on grunts and groans.

"Ever since his early days in Them, on through the overtly mystical years of Astral Weeks and Veedon Fleece, and up to his current incarnation as a gruff R&B songman (yes, with profoundly wrongheaded views on Covid-19 vaccines and lockdowns), he’s always aimed to unify the moans and shouts of his idols like Lead Belly and Ray Charles with a insatiable quest for what Greil Marcus (via Ralph J. Gleason) likes to describe as 'the yarragh' — the bedrock truth of a given song."