National Geographic Music (National Geographic)

If Asha Bhosle and Lata Mangeshkar were the undisputed 20th-century queens of Bollywood playback singing, then Mohammed Rafi would certainly be its king. Rafi was born in a village near the city of Amritsar in Punjab, but when he was a teenager his family moved to Lahore. From a young age, he was entranced by music; many stories are told about Rafi following local singing fakirs around their village. Once in Lahore, he began taking music lessons from renowned artists like the vocalist Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan and Ghulam Ali Khan.

When he was just 17, he made his professional debut singing in the Punjabi film Gul Baloch, directed by Shyam Sunder. With that success under his belt, he left Lahore in the early 1940s to follow his dreams to Bombay, the epicenter of the Indian film industry. There, his first big hit was the Feroz Nizami-composed song "Tera Khilona Toota Balak" in the film Anmol Ghadi, sung as a duet with another Bollywood (and later Lollywood) monarch, Noor Jehan. During those first years in Bombay, Rafi also appeared in short movie roles.

Soon, though, Rafi formed a blazing partnership with the composer Naushad; their first project together was the song "Hindustan ke Hum Hain (We Belong to Hindustan)" for the 1944 film Pehle Aap. Soon, whenever Naushad required a male singer, Rafi was his first choice.

During Partition in 1947, Rafi made the fateful choice to remain in India (unlike Noor Jehan, who migrated to the nascent nation of Pakistan and remained there for the rest of her legendary career). During the 1940s and beyond, Rafi became a favorite singer not just for Naushad but also for other top-drawer composers including SD Burman, OP Nayyar (for whom he often partnered with Asha Bhosle) and Shankar Jaikishan. In the 1960s and 1970s, the composer duo Laxmikant-Pyarelal turned to Rafi to voice the heroes of their films, and that partnership became the stuff of legend as they turned out hit after hit.

In 1965, the government of India honored Rafi with the prestigious Padma Sri award. Along with his incredible career as a film singer, his performances of ghazals were popular as well.

Rafi passed away in 1980. As with other Bollywood singers, his recordings are perhaps best appreciated in the context of the films for which they were made, but standout collections like Naushad Presents: The Last Journey of Mohammed Rafi are also available. —Anastasia Tsioulcas