Cyndi Lauper

The singer who was told she would never sing again, and then out-charted every other debut of the decade. Cynthia Ann Stephanie Lauper was born in Brooklyn on June 22, 1953 and raised in Ozone Park, Queens, where she picked up the accent she never lost. She dropped out of high school, worked cover bands through the 1970s, and damaged her voice badly enough in 1977 that doctors doubted it would come back. It did, after a year of retraining with vocal coach Katherine Agresta. She formed the rockabilly band Blue Angel with John Turi, made one album for Polydor in 1980, watched it fail, and filed for bankruptcy.

Portrait Records signed her in 1983 and released She's So Unusual that October. It became the first debut album by a woman to put four singles in the Hot 100's top five — Girls Just Want to Have Fun, Time After Time, She Bop, and All Through the Night — and won her Best New Artist at the 1985 Grammy Awards. The Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry in 2018. Eleven more studio albums followed, across pop, jazz standards, and country, and roughly 50 million records sold. She wrote the score for Kinky Boots and took the 2013 Tony for Best Original Score, the first woman to win that category alone. She co-founded the True Colors Fund in 2008, entered the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2015, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in November 2025.