Umm Kulthum

Born in a Nile Delta village in 1904, Fatima Ibrahim began singing religious hymns as a child with her father, who dressed her as a boy because girls weren't supposed to sing. She moved to Cairo in the early 1920s and built an empire on her powerful contralto and collaborations with poets like Ahmed Rami and composers like Mohamed El Qasabgi and Mohammed Abdel Wahab. For decades she performed musically intricate, lyrically dense songs - "Inta Omri," "Al Atlal," "Alf Laila wa Laila" - that became the sound of Egyptian identity itself. After the 1967 war she toured Arab and European capitals under the slogan "Art for the War Effort," raising funds until just before the 1973 conflict; by then illness kept her from the victory stage, but Sadat sent her a letter of thanks. She died in February 1975, and Cairo stopped.