Mariah Carey

Mariah Carey, born March 27, 1969, in Huntington, New York, to an Irish-American music teacher mother and an African American and Venezuelan American father, is one of the best-selling music artists of all time and the most successful singer-songwriter of the 1990s, a vocal technician of unparalleled range whose whistle register, melismatic vocal runs, and emotional interpretive power have made her the defining voice of modern R&B pop for three decades. She grew up on Long Island with limited resources, her parents divorcing when she was three, and her extraordinary vocal gifts emerged so early and so powerfully that by her mid-teens she had moved to New York City to pursue a music career. She was working as a hat checker and waitress when she handed her demo tape to Columbia Records president Tommy Mottola at an industry party in 1988 — he listened to it in his limousine and turned the car around to find her. Her self-titled debut album Mariah Carey (1990) produced four consecutive number-one singles, making her the only artist in history to achieve that with a debut album. Emotions (1991), Music Box (1993, one of the best-selling albums of all time), Merry Christmas (1994, the best-selling Christmas album in history), Daydream (1995), which produced Fantasy — her first number-one single in history to debut at number one — and Butterfly (1997) made her the most commercially successful artist of the decade. After a difficult period including a public breakdown and the box-office failure of Glitter (2001), she staged one of the great comebacks in music history with The Emancipation of Mimi (2005), which won three Grammy Awards and restored her place at the commercial summit of pop music. All I Want for Christmas Is You remains the most successful Christmas song in history.