Kattassery Joseph Yesudas (born 10 January 1940) is an Indian playback singer and musician who sings Indian classical, devotional and film songs. Yesudas is estimated to have recorded more than 50,000 songs in various Indian languages, including Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, Hindi, Odia,Bengali, Marathi as well as Arabic, English, Latin, and Russian, in a career spanning six decades. He is often referred to as Gaanagandharvan (transl. The Celestial Singer).[5] He is one of the highly acclaimed singers in India. Yesudas holds the recordfor singing 11 songs in different languages in a single day. He has also composed a number of Malayalam film songs during the 1970s and 1980s.
Yesudas won the National Award for the Best Male Playback Singer record eight times, the Filmfare Awards South five times, and the State Award for the Best Playback Singer forty-three times, including awards given by the state governments of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and West Bengal. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1975, the Padma Bhushan in 2002, and the Padma Vibhushan (second-highest civilian award) in 2017 by the Government of India for his contributions towards the arts. In 2005, he was honoured with the J. C. Daniel Award, Kerala government‘s highest honour for contributions to Malayalam cinema. In 2011 Yesudas was honoured with the CNN-IBN outstanding achievement award for his contributions in the music field. In 2006, he sang 16 film songs in four South Indian languages on the same day at AVM Studio, Chennai. As a result of all these accolades and recognition, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest singers in the history of Indian Music and also as a cultural icon of Kerala