The starting point
The general award for a female vocal performance goes back to the first Grammy ceremony in May 1959, which honoured recordings from 1958. That is the reason the 1959 ceremony is the starting point for any history of women winning for singing, and it is also why nothing about the award began in 1967. The year 1967 sits in the middle of the category’s life, at a time when the broad award was giving way to narrower ones.
Because a vocal award for women existed from the first ceremony, it is risky to name one person as the winner of a “first” in a loose sense. Ella Fitzgerald is widely cited among the women honoured at the first ceremony, but where sources disagree about the exact category or wording, this article does not make a single-winner claim.
What the broad award was
In the early Grammys, the performance awards were organised more by the type of work than by genre. There were vocal awards for women and for men, and these were not confined to one style. A singer of standards, a pop vocalist and a jazz-trained performer could all be considered in the same field. The category sat alongside many others for instrumental, group and album work.
This breadth was a feature of its time. The recording business of the late 1950s still thought of popular music largely as one wide field: orchestras, crooners, big-band alumni and the emerging rock and roll stars were sold in the same shops. A single women’s vocal prize made sense in that world.
Why it split
By the 1960s that assumption was breaking down. The pop charts now carried rhythm and blues, soul, country, folk and rock, and the Academy responded by adding categories. Several pressures pushed in the same direction:
- The audience for each genre was increasingly separate, and so were the radio formats that served it, from Top 40 radio to the newer FM radio stations.
- A single women’s vocal prize forced very different performers to compete in a single category.
- Voters and critics argued that a broad award was likely to favour the most mainstream choice.
As a result, the late 1960s and the following decades brought genre-specific vocal awards for women in pop, country, rhythm and blues, and later rock. The original broad category either disappeared or was reshaped into one of these, depending on the year. That is why the “Best Female Vocal Performance” of the title is best understood as a general label for the early award, not as a stable prize that ran unchanged.
Contrast with the genre awards
A broad award and a set of genre awards produce different histories.
With the broad award, the winners were chosen from a mixed field, and the result said something about what the industry regarded as the best singing overall. With genre awards, a woman in a given style competed against peers in that style, and the result said something narrower but arguably fairer. The cost was that the overall comparison disappeared: there was no longer a single women’s vocal prize that covered everything.
The change also multiplied the number of women who could be honoured. Splitting one award into several meant more women could win in a given year, which is part of the reason later decades show many more women among the winners than the earliest ones.
Women singers of the 1967 era
Two women are often named when the singers of the mid-1960s are discussed, and it is worth being clear about what is and is not claimed here.
Aretha Franklin. In 1967 Franklin moved to Atlantic Records and had a breakthrough with records including “Respect”, which became a signature hit that spring. Her Atlantic years made her one of the most important voices of the decade. This article does not assign her any particular Grammy for 1967.
Dionne Warwick. Warwick was already a leading singer in the 1960s through songs written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, and her records of that period are among the best-known of the decade. As with Franklin, no Grammy claim is made here.
These two examples illustrate the awkwardness of the broad category. Franklin’s soul and gospel style and Warwick’s polished pop sound would have been hard to compare directly in one prize, which is exactly the argument that led to genre categories.
How to use this history
Anyone researching a particular winner should look at the official Recording Academy listings for the relevant year, because category titles were often revised and early names do not match the labels used today. For this site’s purposes, the main points are these:
- A vocal award for women existed from the first Grammy ceremony in 1959.
- It was a broad category, not a genre one.
- Over the 1960s and later it was split into genre awards, and in the early 2010s many gender-split vocal awards were merged into solo categories.
That summary is safer than a single name, and it leaves room for readers to check the records themselves.