It wasn’t because they didn’t want to give other singers a chance. But the more important reason was that it wasn’t easy (and it isn’t easy now, either) to come by the combination of top-quality vocalising ability and top-quality pronouncing/projecting abilities, and when music directors found such a voice, a voice like TMS’s, they latched on to the singer and never let him go.
There weren’t all that many playback singers because there weren’t all that many films being made, which meant that there weren’t all that many songs being composed, at least compared to the numbers now. That’s why, those days, there weren’t all that many playback singers, and the title cards during the opening credits would show the same names. And a singer had to be able to project because when you sang for MGR, the listener had to hear MGR when he closed his eyes as the song played on the radio, and when you sang for Sivaji Ganesan, the listener had to hear Sivaji Ganesan.
A singer had to be able to pronounce the words properly because language was important, because lyrics were important, which meant that the vocal parts of the song were important, more important than the instrumental parts. Those days – the 1950s, the 1960s – a singer was chosen because he could pronounce, because he could project. Those were just the basic considerations, the equivalent of an actor’s ability to remember dialogue and know where to stand in relation to the furniture. To know why TM Soundararajan, TMS, was the last representative of a certain kind of playback singer, you’ll first have to consider that he rose to fame in an era where not everyone could become a playback singer – not even if you had a good voice and could sing on key and hold your breath over long melismatic lines. A tribute to TM Soundararajan, the voice of a generation.
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