Hindi Films Featuring Only One Playback Singer

This is a continuation of the previous post on Hindi Films Featuring Many Playback Singers. The starting point to arriving at a list of Hindi films that used only one playback singer was the same dataset we started with in the previous post.

We took films with only one playback singer from this dataset and removed the following films from it:

1. Films with only one song – This keeps the list manageable. Also, in the context of this discussion, a film with just one solo song isn’t remarkable.
2. Films that have more than one song but most of them are instrumental – “Black” (2005), for instance, has 23 songs. 22 of these are instrumental tracks and one is the beautiful solo “Haan Maine Chhoo Kar Dekha Hai” sung by Gayatri Iyer.
3. Films with incomplete singer credits – Including them may potentially include films with songs sung by more than one singer. 

The list of films featuring only one playback singer:

Some observations based on this list:

• There are 76 Hindi films that have songs sung by just one singer. They are more or less evenly distributed over time, except for a spike in the 1970s.

• The film with the highest number of songs, “Tuhi Ram Tuhi Krishna” (1976), is the dubbed version of the Telugu film “"Sri Krishna Satya" (1972). All its 10 songs were sung by Vani Jayaram. The next film in the list is “Poonam” (1952), with 9 songs sung by Lata Mangeshkar.
• The following singers appear most frequently on the list:
  • Asha Bhosle – 20 films
  • Lata Mangeshkar – 9 films
  • Manna Dey – 4 films
  • Vani Jayaram – 3 films
• The following music directors appear most frequently on the list:
  • R.D. Burman – 5 films, 4 with Asha Bhosle and 1 with Bhupinder
  • Salil Chowdhury – 4 films, all with different singers
  • Madan Mohan – 3 films, 2 with Lata Mangeshkar and 1 with Asha Bhosle
  • Shankar - Jaikishan – 3 films, 2 with Lata Mangeshkar and 1 with Asha Bhosle
  • Satyam – 3 films, all of which were South Indian films dubbed in Hindi