I’ve heard that about her live singing. In “Last Christmas”, it didn’t sound like they used Auto-tune or anything like that. I think she just sang and said “I’m outta here”!
Do you mean the famous version by the Kingsmen? Cuz there are twodiscs worth of records of that song. (Plus others that aren’t on either of those discs, like the Beach Boys’.)
It may be mostly unintelligible, but god damn that’s one of the great rock vocal takes, in my opinion. It is pure rock and roll, and any other take would miss out on the spirit.
My nomination? Now, this may fit into the so-bad-it’s-good, or just purposefully cheekily bad, but Biz Markee’s take on Benny and the Jets is glorious.
Reminded me of a classic cover by the Beatles, taken from a time of wastedness while they were working on Abbey Road. I always liked the part at the end, “he’s one alright.”
My vote has to go to Richard Harris for the original “MacArthur Park.” It’s a complicated story about how he got the tapes for the music accompaniment and recorded the vocals, but it ended up just…weird. I actually like the song, but the vocals are, er, exceptional.
The Cherry Sisters were a famously bad performing group, who lived and performed mostly before the era of recorded music:
The thing is, three f them lived into the 1930s, and two into the 1940s. They could have recorded their act, and there has been speculation and rumors of a lost Cherry Sister recording.
We can only hope this is wrong.
In much the same vein, Florence Foster Jenkins was a would-be diva noted for her inability to sing. Her life was the subject of two recent movies (Marguerite (2015)]Florence Foster Jenkins*(2016lastter starring Meryl Streep). The difference is that Jenkins, unlike the Cherry Sisters, certainly wasp recorded, on audio alone aND on film:
I haven’t heard any of them, but these might qualify as The Worst Vocal Performance of a Recorded Song.
(I own several of the “Golden Throats” albums that contain some of the nominees people have listed above. A lot of the recordings aren’t necessarily bad, just weird. Some are downright good. But the Cherrys and Jenkins were, by all accounts, simply bad.)
Oddly enough, I think the most intelligible version I’ve ever heard (Unless you count bar bands. I’ve heard a number who sang it correctly and intelligibly) was Motorhead’s.
