Jagjit Singh was born at Sri Ganganagar in Rajasthan in 1941 to a Punjabi family, trained in classical music, and studied at Jalandhar.
He took the ghazal, a form performed for a small trained audience in a formal setting, and recorded it with simple accompaniment and clear diction for a mass audience. The Unforgettables, 1976, with Chitra Singh, sold in numbers no ghazal record had.
Purists objected that he had simplified the form. What he had done was make it possible for a person with no training to follow the words, which is what a ghazal is for.
He also recorded Punjabi Sufi and gurbani material, and his recordings of shabads are among the most widely played in Sikh households outside gurdwaras.
His son was killed in a road accident in 1990 at twenty, and his wife Chitra stopped singing after it and never sang again.
He recorded with Chitra Singh through the 1970s and 1980s and the two of them together were the commercial ghazal. The partnership ended as a performing one after their son's death.
The simplification was deliberate: slower tempo, plainer Urdu, western instruments behind the harmonium and tabla, and the couplet given room. It is why people who did not know the language bought the records.
He recorded Punjabi and gurbani material throughout, and his shabad recordings are played in houses across Punjab. He died in 2011.