The movies made in those times included Mythology, Historical, Social and Comedy. You can observe Ghantasala's grip on Hindustani ragas) The music directors were ready to set challenging tunes, like 'Siva Sankari' of Pendyala Nageshwar Rao for example, because they were sure that Ghantasala would deliver it flawlessly. He was 'the' voice of NTR and Nageshwar Rao. Not only the listeners, the whole of film industry was in awe of his voice. His strong voice, combined by his felicity in rendering classical ragas as well as his amazing rendering of padyams, made him a demigod in Andhra Pradesh. Ghantasala, short for Ghantasala Venkateshwar Rao, was a singer whom Telugu listeners worshiped. P.B.Sreenivas, Madhavapeddi Sathyam were some of the male singer but the man who dominated Telugu Film Music went by the name of Ghantasala. P.Leela, Jiki, S Janaki were the other popular singers of those times. As far as singers were concerned, the leading female voice was that of Susheela. Other music directors like Master Venu, T V Raju, Chalapathi Rao and S P Kodandapani were active during these times, the last mentioned being the one gave SPB his first break and later encouraged him a lot. The popular music directors included K V Mahadevan, S Rajeshwar Rao, Pendyala Nageshwar Rao.

In 1967, the leading stars of Telugu films were N T Rama Rao (NTR) and Akkineni Nageshwar Rao (ANR). So we can say that people heard SPB first in 1967. He recorded his first song for 'Sree Sree Maryadaramanna' in Dec 1966 (according to Wiki). The idea is to give you a picture about the Telugu film music scene when SPB made his appearance. You must be surprised as to why the first part of this series is titled, ' A Legend called Ghantasala'.

I will occasionally be making reference to some of the singing shows he did for different TV Channels. I will not be concentrating on other aspects of SPB like his acting or dubbing career. I plan to do a multi part series on SPB, tracing his music career in Tamil, Telugu and Kannada film music. Ghantasala Venkateswara Rao (Photo source: Quora)

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