Who was the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?

Four women were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year - many music lovers will be surprised to learn that Kate Bush and Chaka Khan were not invested long ago. The British singer/songwriter, whose 1985 hit Running Up That Hill enjoyed a resurgence after appearing in season 4 of Stranger Things last year, had to wait 19 years since she was first nominated - and she can count herself lucky compared to Carole King, 35 years from nomination to induction and the Queen of Country Dolly Parton, 36!

Female artists are still criminally underrepresented in the Rock Hall, to date just 65 female stars have been inducted since the inaugural ceremony in 1986, which is around 8 per cent of the total, the remaining 700+ inductees being male artists. Between six and 12 artists are inducted every year - performers who have “influence and significance to the development and perpetuation of rock and roll”.

Aretha arrives

The first female artist to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was Columbia/Atlantic recording star Aretha Franklin The Queen of Soul. She was inducted by Rolling Stones axeman Keith Richards at the 1987 ceremony.

With her roots in gospel, Aretha’s early output on the Columbia label never really made much of an impact. That all changed when she was invited to Rick Hall’s Muscle Shoals studios in 1967 after signing for Atlantic. Her first recording, backed by the esteemed session musicians the Swampers, tapped right into the Muscle Shoals’ mysterious energy - I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You) shot to No.1 on the R&B chart, and crept into the Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100.

Hit after hit followed and Aretha never looked back. Her upbeat version of Otis Redding’s Respect became the battle cry for the civil rights movement while her 1972 gospel album Amazing Grace went double platinum. Today, she remains one of the best-selling artists of all-time with over 25,000,000 album sales worldwide, including 10,598,000 in the United States and 660,000 in the United Kingdom.

Simply the best

Two artists have been inducted twice - as part of the groups they were starred with and individually: Tina Turner, with Ike and Tina Turner in 1991 and as a solo artist in 2021; and Stevie Nicks - with Fleetwood Mac in 1998 and in her own right in 2019.

While the original focus tended to focus on rock and roll, artists from other genres have started to receive recognition. Nevertheless, there are still many glaring omissions, and hopefully future inductees - Irma Thomas, Ann Peebles, Anita Baker, Marcia Griffiths, Pauline Black, Dionne Warwick, Julie Driscoll, Miriam Makeba, Astrud Gilberto...