I always thought she was one of those soul singers with a great voice and awful songs.

The weird thing about her having one of the great pop voices is that she was connected to one of my favourite female vocalists ever, Dionne Warwick (her cousin), and her godmother was (indeed, still is) the legendary Aretha Franklin. Some of it must have rubbed off.

An astonishing voice. Shame.

Her voice was great. But then I've heard plenty of great voices, many of them never made much or anything out of the record business. Indeed, two I can think of emanated from people who never claimed to be remotely interested in a music career.

If "talent shows" such as X-Factor, Pop Idol, American Idol etc. have shown us one thing it is that great voices aren't so rare a thing. I mean, American Idol is packed to the gunnels with people who can sing the hearts out of hummingbirds.

My biggest gripe with Houston (aside from her godawful lyrics) was her insatiable habit for introducing all manner of distracting - to the point of downright annoying - tics, lip-quivers and other facial contrivances for added effect (almost all were not present early on). So much so that toward the end of her career she seemed like one giant antic formed out of many smaller ones.

Is she dead? You'd have thought they would have mentioned it on the BBC News channel.

Well it's nice to see some heavyweights saying that she did have a great voice.
It doesn't really matter to me that she was not to many people's taste, that is always going to be the case.
But I admired the work that must have gone into that voice, she must have worked damned hard.
I also admired that she (foolishly perhaps) pushed her voice to the absolute limit of what it could do and still kept it tuneful.
She burned her voice out and that can't have helped her in her personal life.
She would have had problems with how wonderful she was and how crap she had become.

Pretty much. There are an awful lot of drossy lyrics in some great operas – 'Your tiny hand is frozen' is one, but you don't listen to La Boheme for the lyrics, but for Puccini's music.

Having those lyrics in a langaueg that most listeners won't instantly understand helps, though.

Would you consider Mario Lanza, Pavarotti, Caruso etc great artists? - they only had a voice, they were signing other peoples lyrics written 200+ years before?

For me great voice but not a patch on other artists of the genre like Maria Carey.

Slightly OT, but Pavarotti was not just great, he was the greatest. Possibly ever, but certainly in living memory. I'm still gutted that I'll never get to see him live. I remember seeing the Three Tenors concert on TV, and marvelling at how he made two pretty spectacular singers look rather ordinary by comparison. Opera is far from my favourite genre, but I could never tire of seeing him at his best.

Carey makes me squirm every time I see or hear her.

Streisand certainly had a fantastic voice and could sing superbly across genres (from classical to pop). Often, with her, the biggest problem was the paucity of modern material, which is why she's always been so well served by returning, time and again, to Sondheim.

I'd actually put Ute Lemper in a similar category – different voice; an absolutely superb interpreter of the chanson style of the first half of the 20th century, and a very good show singer (see the original London revival cast of Chicago), but let down by a paucity of good modern material that suited her voice – up to and including her own compositions.

Pavarotti was superb – as Rock God says – and with extraordinary charisma. What you have to also remember with opera is that singers are increasingly expected to be decent actors too. Pav was probably the best voice, but Placido Domingo is generally regarded as the best lyric tenor of that generation.

On the idea that singing someone else's compositions makes you somehow less 'legitimate' (if you will) as an artist, it's a ridiculous argument. It would leave us decrying the likes of Sinatra or Martin. While Nina Simone (mentioned earlier) has written much of her own material (and what a voice), Ella Fitzgerald – possibly the greatest female crooner of all time – didn't. It doesn't mean she wasn't an absolute star of the highest order.

And if the singer-songwriter was considered the only true musician, where would that leave the composers themselves, who didn't perform (or at least not sing/act) their own works – from Mozart, through Gershwin and Porter and right on to the present?

I used that argument time and again when I was a know-nothing teenager arguing with my dad about who's records to play on our one record player in the house (oh how times have changed!), my trump card was always "Well at least Rod Stewart writes his own material, Sinatra doesn't", I cringe when I think of that now

Sticking with that comparison though its very noticable now how Mr Stewart rarely strays outside of his now one octave range when picking suitable songs, and listening to a Sinatra album (yes, my fathers music choice did influence me) last night which was recorded live at Carnegie Hall when he was in his 70s, it was also true of Sinatra that his range was very limited at that time, almost limited to talking through most songs, its very sad to hear and you wonder why he felt the need to continue performing to a live audience.