Kattassery Joseph Yesudas PVB (born 10 January 1940) is an Indian musician and film playback singer. Yesudas sings Indian classical, devotional and cinematic songs. He has recorded more than 100,000 songs in a number of Indian languages including Hindi, Malayalam and Tamil as well as Russian, Arabic, Latin and English during a career spanning more than five decades.
He has performed in most Indian languages except Assamese, Konkani and Kashmiri.He also composed a number of Malayalam film songs in the 1970s and 1980s. Yesudas is fondly called Gana Gandharvan (The Celestial Singer). He is considered to be a cultural icon of the Malayalam language - as well as of its ethnic group spread across the world - largely due to the fact that his songs have been ingrained into the minds of Malayalam speaking people for five decades.
Yesudas won the National Award for the Best Male Playback Singer seven times, the Filmfare Awards 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 1977, 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 2011 Yesudas was honoured with the CNN-IBN outstanding achievement award having recorded over 20,000 songs in a five-decade career. In 2006, he sang 16 film songs in four South Indian languages on the same day at AVM Studio, Chennai.
K. J. Yesudas was born in Fort Kochi, in the erstwhile Kingdom of Cochin (now Kerala), in a Latin-rite Roman Catholic Christian family to late Augustine Joseph and late Elizabeth Joseph. His father, a well-known Malayalam classical musician and stage actor, was his first guru (teacher). Yesudas was the eldest of five children, and was followed by three younger brothers and a younger sister.
Yesudas recorded his first popular song Jaathi Bhedam Matha Dwesham (music: M B Sreenivasan) on 14th November 1961. However, his first popular song was 'Attention Penne Attention', which he sang for a Malayalam film with Santha P. Nair, a veteran singer of that time. Thus began his career in playback singing which included the Malayalam movie Kaalpadukal (1962) and Tamil, Telugu and Kannada movies thereafter.
After a decade of singing in South Indian movies, Yesudas got a break in Bollywood in the early 1970s. The first Hindi song he sang was for the movie Jai Jawan Jai Kissan (1971), but the first released movie was Chhoti Si Baat, which resulted in his becoming popular for singings songs like "Jaaneman Jaaneman". He has sung Hindi songs for many leading actors in Hindi cinema including Amitabh Bachchan, Amol Palekar and Jeetendra. He has sung many evergreen Hindi film songs for music directors including Ravindra Jain, Bappi Lahiri, Khayyam, Rajkamal and Salil Chowdhury. Yesudas' most popular Hindi songs are in the 1976 movie Chitchor, with music given by Ravindra Jain.
Yesudas is married to Prabha. They have three sons, Vinod, Vijay and Vishal. Their second son Vijay Yesudas is a musician who won the Kerala State Film Award for Best Male Playback Singer in 2007 and 2013.
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