Introduction If I should take a notionTo jump into the ocean'Tain't nobody's bizness if I do. Bessie Smith sang those lines in 1923, but they would be appropriate for any of the "girl singers" in this book, at any time during the twentieth century. This book tells the stories of ten women who went about their own business, regardless of what other people said or did. These women took charge of their lives and their singing careers, with the possible exception of Judy Garland, who spent most of her difficult life under the thumb of others. But she, too, triumphed in the end: She is probably the best known of all of the singers here.This book concentrates on just ten performers out of easily a hundred candidates who qualified as "great singers" in the United States from the years 1900 through 1999. How to choose just ten?First of all, they had to be terrific singers whose voices I wanted to listen to over and over. That doesn't necessarily mean they had great voices.

The jazz singer Anita O'Day did not have much of a vocal instrument, certainly as compared to her better-known contemporary, Sarah Vaughan. But what Anita did with her little voice was more interesting to me than what Sarah did with her magnificent one.Each woman had to have an interesting story to tell. How did she become a singer? Did she take charge right away, or did others manage for her? What stood in her way and how did she get around it, or push it aside? In each of the ten stories I tell here, a woman struggles to make the most of her musical gift.The singers represent ten different genres of popular music and entertainment. Sophie Tucker was a "red-hot mama" in vaudeville, Bette Midler a rock singer who found her niche in cabaret. Joan Baez sang folk songs, and Judy Garland starred in movie musicals. Every singer in this book made a significant contribution to her genre as well as to the culture in general.

The book is organized by decade, with one singer per decade. Each singer appears in the decade in which she did her best or most prolific work. Pairing a singer and a decade was a challenge for the 1990s, which were still rolling as I wrote. Suddenly I was no longer dealing with history but with the present. How was I to know which of the top performers would still be considered exceptional ten, twenty, thirty years from now? The solution: Chapter 10 focuses on "three faces" of country music, with Lucinda Williams, a singer-songwriter on the fringe of mainstream country, as the central figure, and two hugely popular crooners, Wynonna Judd and LeAnn Rimes, in sidebars.Following these criteria meant leaving out many wonderful performers, including some of my -- and, no doubt, the reader's -- favorites. Rosemary Clooney, whose recordings I'd take to that imagined desert island where you're allowed only one or two treasured possessions, is not in the book. She was best known in the 1950s but did her most acclaimed work in the 1980s and 1990s, and she did not, I feel, represent the events and national mood of those decades.

Aretha Franklin is also not here, because I felt her story was too thin, perhaps because she is a private person and has yet to reveal much of her past. A popular singing trio from the 1920s and 1930s, the Boswell Sisters, also didn't make the book, but Connee Boswell and her siblings, Vet and Martha, did record a song in 1931 whose title, "Shout, Sister, Shout," captured exactly the sentiment I had about the work of my chosen singers and thus inspired the title of this book. The list goes on: Barbra Streisand, Doris Day, Mahalia Jackson, Peggy Lee, Whitney Houston, Ella Fitzgerald, Janis Joplin, Billie Holiday, Patsy Cline, and Linda Ronstadt -- to name just a handful of other great voices. I apologize for their absence.How do I know a great singer from a not-so-great singer? I come to this book from more than twenty years as a music critic for ne.