For six decades, S P Balasubrahmanyam was king of happy, boisterous numbers

S P Balasubrahmanyam, who died in Chennai on Friday, ranks among Indian cinema’s greatest singing legends.

He was as prolific as any you can name. If the legends reigning in Mumbai---Kishore, Lata and Asha, for instance---were singing at a frenetic pace, he was matching them, hit for hit, here in the south. In a country hungry for songs, his numbers were among the most requested on Vividh Bharati.

Called Balu and SPB, he was more versatile than his peers, and was simultaneously active in multiple languages. At about 40,000 songs, he is sure to find a place among the world’s most recorded artistes. A special distinction was that he could switch between languages with ease. He has sung the most number of songs in Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and Hindi. South of the Vindhyas, he had the bounciest voice among all singers of his generation.

Balu gave spectacular hits in Tamil and Telugu, but he had a special place in his heart for Kannada, and he did not hesitate to say so on his TV shows. His songs defined the careers of many Kannada heroes, starting with Vishnuvardhan, who made a sensational debut as hero in Puttanna Kanagal’s Nagarahavu (1975). Balu’s Haavina dwesha/hanneradu varusha (music Vijayabhaskar) is a song the youth of the ‘70s remember to this day. It was an unusually dissonant song, throbbing with the rebellious hero’s angst, and standing out from the sweet songs that ruled the day.

Voice of many heroes

In later years, Balu similarly sang for Shivarajkumar, Ravichandran and Puneeth Rajkumar, giving them hit playlists of their own. No street or wedding orchestra singing Kannada song ever wraps up a show without singing Balu’s Joteyali/jote joteyali, remade later in Tamil, and again for the Amitabh Bachchan-Tabu starrer Cheeni Kum (2007). The Kannada song is from Geetha (1981), a film Shankar Nag directed and acted in. It is a stylish song with Ilaiyaraaja’s trademark violins providing lush interludes. You can count at least two dozen such Balu songs with everlasting appeal. And several hundreds that make it to nostalgic playlists, although he continued to be active till he was hospitalised for a coronavirus infection.

Ease of diction

Balu handled the varying diction of Kannada, Telugu and Tamil effortlessly. He worked with the best lyrical talent across languages, and no one ever said he had got a linguistic nuance wrong. His Hindi songs were an exception, and many could detect his southerness in them, but thankfully, it didn’t rob him of opportunities. Salman Khan, badshah of the box office even in the ‘90s, had many of his songs sung by Balu.

Kishore parallel

Balu was 74 when he died on Thursday, and was comparable in many ways to Kishore Kumar, who brought a youthful brashness to film songs in an era dominated by the melancholic Mukesh and the intense Mohammed Rafi. Balu emerged similarly in an era dominated by Ghantasala in Telugu and P B Sreenivas in Kannada, both great singers with soulful styles. Balu’s singing was more cocky and energetic than soulful. He became the consistent screen voice of Vishnuvardhan, Srinath and Ambareesh, Anant Nag and Shankar Nag, while Sreenivas remained the voice of Rajkumar.

An engineering student who gravitated to singing, Balu worked with a host of composers. In Kannada, he recorded his first song in 1966, just a few months after he had recorded his debut song in Telugu. He then became a favourite with G K Venkatesh, Upendra Kumar, Vijayabhaskar and Satyam, among others. After the ‘80s, he became a regular for Ilaiyaraja, and his winning streak continued when A R Rahman scored music for Roja. In Kannada, Balu’s songs in Premaloka, for which Hamsalekha made the music, became sensational hits.

Known to modulate his voice to suit the idiosyncrasies of each hero, he became Ravichandran’s voice as well. So, while he did get to sing sad songs like Noorondu nenapu (Bandhana, 1984), he was essentially a singer of happy, boisterous love songs. He just didn’t have the heaviness and gravitas of a Mukesh, Manna Dey or PB Sreenivas.

Sugama sangeeta

In Ede Thumbi Haaduvenu, a widely watched TV music show Balu conducted in Kannada for a decade, he often spoke of his love for the Kannada sugama sangeetha genre, which taps into contemporary poetry and provides a middle path between classical music and film music. It was a living tradition, he believed, that wasn’t easy to find in other languages. A sugama sangeeta LP he recorded in 1984, titled Maavu Bevu, featured lyrics by Doddarangegowda. It had music by C Aswath, whose boatman-style flight of voice and choppy enunciation of words he was fond of.

Curiously, Balu won a national award for a traditional Hindustani bandish he sang in the Kannada film Ganayogi Panchakshari Gavai (1995), a blind guru who generously nurtured generations of musicians in northern Karnataka. ‘Umand ghumand’ is not one of Balu’s best songs; it was perhaps a bandish best assigned to Pandit Venkatesh Kumar, a maestro in his own right, and a real-life disciple of Panchakshari Gavai. Without doubt, he would have rendered raga Mia Malhar and its improvisatory spirals better. However, Balu delivered huge hits in the Telugu films Shankarabharanam (K V Mahadevan) and Swathi Muthyam (Ilaiyaraaja), both of which drew on the Karnatak classical tradition. He was able to adapt the southern classical style better to the popular film idiom. Vijayabhaskar, Puttanna Kanagal’s favourite music composer, once told me Yesudas, who had sung Hindustani raga-based songs for films like Chitchor (1976), might have pulled off ‘Umand ghumand’ better.

SPB ruled the south Indian film industry with his energy and talent. He occasionally acted and composed music, but he will be remembered best for his singing. With his exit, an era of superstar southern singers has come to an end.