Karen Carpenter and Janis Joplin

I'd love it if wonderful beauties like Weyes Blood can live all comfy off their music and not worry about crap, though I also like seeing my fav current performers at a cool club rather than some stadium in which the tickets were already bought by bots from scumbag re-sellers. Nothing made me happier than seeing these scalpers desperate to sell off their Katy Perry 2017 tickets for pennies. Hilarious. 

The modern "it" scene is such a mess that no-one knows what works. I wanted to like Billie Eilish just for her soft vocals and demeanor...I just wish that I could stand her album before getting annoyed after two songs. No soul-wails or nasal-drills, but damn, her brother sucks.

It's better not to think about mainstream preferences, and just look around a little bit concerning groups similar to your favs. Cool stuff can pop up,and if it'd by an earnest artist with not a lot of YouTube clicks or other crap, let them know you're a fan. Just do it.

Singers with a range similar to Karen Carpenter are out there, but yeah, assembly-line entertainment doesn't pay much attention (more into air-raid sirens and nasal Eponine wannabes).

One singer with that style is Weyes Blood, who probably won't be performing on SNL anytime soon, but has garnered a massive cult following. Her latest album has a 91% on metacritic, and the enormous attention given to her on RYM (currently at #2 with a slew of reviews for 2019) tells me the general public are missing out, but there's a hunger for that style of singing by music fans. I saw her live this year; she interchanged from playing keyboards and guitar (not drums though!), and sang superbly throughout. Plus her mere presence was amazing.

As for Janis, for whatever reason, I think if the mid-late 90's female singer/songwriter boom was allowed to continue without the label conglomerates eventually dumping most of the artists for female-hating nu-metal and alt-metal bands, her style could've made a comeback. If I dug around, I feel that I can find some plugging away these days. There's a lot of cool female singers/musicians under the radar.

To be fair, her voice WAS one in a million.  And Phil Collins had to find a work around too once he became Genesis' vocalist so drummers who sing well tend to have a problem of plenty. The more troubling part about the Carpenter saga is Richard and the label insisting she ought to keep her voice always in that low contralto-ish range.  Understand...she wasn't REALLY a contralto.  Her lowest notes aren't much lower, if at all, than a legit soprano like Annie Haslam (OK Annie has mezzo-ish depth low but still...).  That is, Karen Carpenter was a mezzo who was made to sing like a contralto to conform to a certain image.  Richard disliked it when she recorded Don't Cry For Me Argentina but I find nothing wrong with that version.  You can find other versions like Elaine Page where the interpretation is arguably more apt for the material but the insinuation from the Richard camp that the song exposed how weak Karen's high notes were is...I don't even know where that comes from.  Duh, when a woman gets into her head voice, it is going to sound a little different from her chest voice, that's very normal.  And it's not something only women have to do, even a metal God like Rob Halford can't get his Ripper voice up into the fifth octave. 

One can observe not only from the Little Girl Blue book Finnforest mentioned but also various documentaries, a tendency by Richard and Agnes to control Karen Carpenter and shape her career in a way THEY wanted and not necessarily what she sought out.  This is also why the solo album drove Richard crazy; the very idea of Karen swinging freely to disco was too much for him to take.  No, Karen HAD to be the homely nightbird singing in that precocious manner and nothing else would do.

Nice to see a thoughtful thread on classic female vocalists.

Another woman who deserves much praise imo is Linda Ronstadt. I'm doing a deep dive now through her 28 studio albums, and I feel like a fool for not paying more attention sooner. She is an amazing vocalist with great musical instincts, and her albums are, at different times, diverse, fun, moving, surprising.

I now im my friendzone know plenty of stellar female drummers, bass players, guitarists and so on, when i see them i think of Karen and other female lead rythem instrumentalists