KJ Yesudas birthday special: 7 popular Malayalam songs of Gana Gandharvan

By Team Asianet Newsable | First Published Jan 10, 2024, 7:30 AM IST

Happy Birthday, KJ Yesudas: The popular singer who has been in the profession for over six decades, is one of India's most recognised singers, having sung over 50,000 songs in every Indian language, including Malayalam, Tamil, and Hindi. Fans refer to him as Gana Gandharvan (The Celestial Singer).

Yesudas has also received several awards, winning the National Award for Best Male Playback Singer seven times. He has garnered five Filmfare awards and a staggering forty-three State Awards for Best Playback Singer, including honours from the state governments of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and West Bengal.

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Here's a collection of his favourite seven Malayalam songs for his 84th birthday.

Kattassery Joseph Yesudas was born to Augustine Joseph and Elizabeth Joseph in Kochi, Kerala, into a Latin Catholic Christian family. His father was an accomplished Malayalam classical musician and stage performer. Yesudas was the second of seven children, after an elder sister named Pushpa and four younger brothers named Antony (Antappan), Babu, Mani, Justin, and a younger sister named Jayamma.

Musician Kunjan Velu Bhagavathar, Augustine Joseph's best friend, was his first guru. Yesudas began his academic music education at R. L. V. Music Academy in Thrippunithura, where he finished the Ganabooshanam course.

Later, he studied at the Swathi Thirunal College of Music in Thiruvananthapuram under the supervision of Carnatic music maestros K. R. Kumaraswamy Iyer and Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer but was unable to finish his studies due to financial difficulties. He also studied music briefly under Vechoor Harihara Subramania Iyer, after which he had additional tuition from Chembai Vaidyanatha Bhagavatar.

Yesudas's Career
On November 14, 1961, Yesudas recorded his first popular song, Jaathi Bhedam Matha Dwesham. The singer believes the four words he got to sing to begin his film career to be a big blessing because they were penned by none other than Sree Narayana Guru, Kerala's most revered saint-poet-social reformer.

Over the course of his six-decade career, Yesudas is claimed to have recorded over 80,000 songs in various Indian languages, including Malayalam, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Hindi, Odia, Bengali, and Marathi, as well as Arabic, English, Latin, and Russian. On the same day in 2006, he sang 16 film songs in four South Indian languages at AVM Studio in Chennai. Yesudas has a record for singing 11 songs in various languages daily. During the 1970s and 1980s, he also composed many Malayalam cinema songs.

Yesudas's Awards
Yesudas won the National Award for Best Male Playback Singer a record eight times, five Filmfare Awards South, and forty-three State Awards for Best Playback Singer.

He has received state government honours from Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and West Bengal. The Government of India honoured him with the Padma Shri in 1975, the Padma Bhushan in 2002, and the Padma Vibhushan in 2017 for his services to the arts.

In 2005, he received the J. C. Daniel Award, Kerala's highest accolade for services to Malayalam film.

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