Who are the performers you can identify after hearing just a few bars..

I'm not talking about songs that you know, I mean stuff that's new to you, where you can tell it's them just by the sound.

Here are some of mine:

Male: Hank Williams, Sinatra, Mel Torme, Dean Martin, Hendrix and Les Paul on guitar, Tom Petty, Delbert McClinton, Kris Kristofferson, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Dylan (yeah, there is actually Dylan stuff out there I'm hearing for the first time), George Harrison, John Lennon, Springsteen.

Female: Christine McVie, Ella Fitzgerald, Suzanne Vega, Sade, Rosemary Clooney, Diana Krall, Stevie Nicks (unfortunately), Rickie Lee Jones, Chrissy Hynde (sp?), Patsy Cline, Allison Kraus, Gillian Welch.

The first time the radio played "Where the Streets have no Name" I could tell it was their new song with the first guitar note.

But I can understand how U2 could be identified... the guitar sound on several songs on Joshua Tree is very unique.

I could probably pick out something from The Band that way. They had a certain sound on a lot of their stuff.

The thoughts that came to my mind: Pink Floyd, Jeff Beck, Steve Vai, Eddie Van Halen, Alex Lifeson, Pat Matheny, Chet Atkins, Christopher Parkening, Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Yes, Genesis, Robert Fripp, Frank Zappa, Adrian Belew, Jan Hammer, Jean Luc Ponty....

And for composers: Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Mahler, Mozart, Bach, Terry Riley, Penderecki, David Gilmour, Brian Eno, Tom Waits, Laurie Anderson, Stockhausen...

As for singers: hundreds of them.

Can you really distinguish Stockhausen from other people with humongous sound libraries and tape splicers? Does his oeuvre make sense to you as a style? (I mean this as a real question, not to instigate a flame war.)

I've got some of Deutche Grammofon's old Stockhausen LPs, and I've got contemporary works by Cage, Ussachevsky, the old Columbia-Princeton sages, etc. I can't really tell them apart.* The guys that seem to me to stand out are Morton Subotnick and Tod Dockstader, who seem to be more interested in rhythm than the rest of them.

*Obviously I don't mean they all sound alike, and obviously when I hear Gesange der Junglinge I know it's Stockhausen and not Cage. But I doubt that if a new recording of Short Wave came down the pike that I'd recognize it as Stockhausen's score and not a new realization of Fontana Mix, if you know what I mean.

composers, producers, string arrangers)

because all their fucking songs sound the same. Lame assholes.

new song on the radio and thinking, "That's Linda Ronstadt - or is it? No, is it someone else? No, it IS Linda Ronstadt." And often it was someone else.

and also U2.

David Bowie

my brain just sorta works that way....what's really cool is getting the jazz sax or keyboard player after just a few notes....

:D

But I have a very irrational thing about that whole Fleetwood Mac scene, and I kind of take it out on Stevie and Lindsey Buckingham. I have no reason to do so, but I blame them for the departure of Christine McVie, who I really like a lot.

Dumb, huh?

Oh and I think Stevie is way overplayed on the radio. She's the Stairway to Heaven of female vocalists.

I hardly ever hear Stevie on our local stations. *sniff*

And the drama between Lindsay and Stevie is a large part of why I love the two of them so much. I have a concert video of their 1996 album "The Dance", where Stevie and Lindsay are just screaming certain songs at each other. The raw emotion is breathtaking. *sigh*

I have only one local station here in NYC that I listen to regularly. The rest are banished forever.

I listen to a lot of streaming on line. You can pick up XM radio streaming free, it's especially easy if you're on AOL.

I do like West Virginia a lot. Real nice people, beautiful countryside.

Sort of like that lazy Fats Domino Blueberry Hill Waltzy riff.

yelp, "Oh, yeah!" or "Well..." I was shuffling through a best of cd of his in the car (looking for a particular song) and starting laughing at the frequency of this. It sounded hilarious one after another.

Don't all Inkspots songs also have some kind of monologue in the middle, too?

makes me so damn happy.

and some of the ones you named.

for starters :D

the Indigo Girls, REM, a bunch more (including some in the OP).

I actually heard a cover of a Stevie Wonder song (one I didn't know) on the new Brand New Heavies album and immediately could tell it was Stevie. Even with someone else singing it I said to my husband "This sounds like an old Stevie Wonder song or something," and sure enough I was right.

Allison Kraus and Gillian Welch I get mixed up ALL the time though. Even songs that I *do* know by them.

yeah it's tough to tell them apart, but after many hours listening to both of them, I'm pretty good at it now. Of course I know most of their individual songs, but anyway...

Allison's voice is softer, kind of angelic. Gillian's has a harder edge.

I just love em' both.

Allison and Gillian singing "I'll Fly Away." Pretty weird considering I have 5000 or so songs on my ipod. A nice way to start out the day though.

But I added Hendrix and Les Paul on guitar because they are so distinctive, at least for me.

I've thought about it some more, and read the responses, and I agree that ther are many, many voices that are easy to identify if we've heard them enough. Instrumentalists, bands, composers, etc. are much tougher for amatuers like me.

But to answer your question: no boundaries here... make the subject as broad or narrow as you wish.

So many people have such distinctive voices!

Many years ago, though, my friend and I were listening to the radio and we heard the beginning of a song we'd never heard before. I said, "This sounds like John Cougar," (yes, it was THAT long ago!) and my friend agreed. When the vocals began, we knew we'd been right.

The song, BTW, was Hurts So Good from American Fool.

What the song is before and after (if there is one)