Mohammed Rafi

Mohammed Rafi was an Indian playback singer whose voice carried the soundtracks of Hindi cinema's golden age across more than three decades and into living memory across the subcontinent. Born on December 24, 1924, in the village of Kotla Sultan Singh in Punjab, he was the second of six brothers in a Pashtun family that later moved to Lahore, where his elder brother ran a barbershop.

He first sang publicly at age thirteen during a 1937 concert by K. L. Saigal and trained in Hindustani classical music under Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan, and others. Composer Shyam Sundar gave him his first film recording in the 1944 Punjabi feature Gaon Ki Gori. Moving to Bombay, he caught the ear of Naushad, who featured him on Baiju Bawra in 1952 and Mother India in 1957.

By the 1960s Rafi had become the dominant male voice of Bollywood, recording for nearly every major leading man, including Dilip Kumar, Dev Anand, Shammi Kapoor, Rajendra Kumar, and Rishi Kapoor. He moved fluently between qawwali, ghazal, romantic ballad, patriotic anthem, and rock-and-roll, sometimes recording five or six songs a day. Estimates of his total output range from around 7,000 to over 25,000 songs in Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, and other languages.

He won six Filmfare Awards and the Padma Shri in 1967. After a brief eclipse by Kishore Kumar in the early 1970s, he returned to the top of playback work before suffering a fatal heart attack in Bombay on July 31, 1980.

The name Mohammed is Arabic, meaning praiseworthy. He bore the masculine form.