Born in Madurai, Tamil Nadu on September 16, 1916, as Kunjamma, Subbulakshmi grew up surrounded by music. Initially, her mother Shanmugavadivu, a veena player, trained her.
Intrigued by gramophone records, Kunjamma would roll a piece of paper and sing into it for hours. She cut her first disc at the age of 10. The songs were maragatavadivu andOothukuzhiyinile in an impossibly high pitch.
From her formative years, MS worked hard to perfect her diction, understand the inner meaning of the composition and spent months memorising Sanskrit texts. Even in her seventies, she learnt new songs and recorded them.
“Music is an ocean and I am a student. For a vocalist, voice practice is important. It has been my habit to learn the meaning of songs I have to sing and the correct pronunciation of each word,” she once wrote in a magazine, when she was 73.
It was through the Columbia Gramophone Company records that she was first noticed in Chennai even before she was in her teens.
When she was 15 or 16, she was invited to sing at a wedding, where she sang for two hours while the audience sat mesmerised.
By 1932, she had become a sort of cult figure for a whole generation of youngsters. In 1932, her mother Shanmukhavadivu decided to shift to Chennai.
The move was a blessing in disguise, as MS got a break in films, acting in many successful ones, including the all-time Indian classic Meera.
In 1933, the year of the Mahamaham, a festival celebrated every 12 years in Kumbakonam, film director K Subramaniam organised a concert of MS in the town.
MS took the town by storm. It gave her a chance to give a concert at the Music Academy in Madras.
Magazines like Ananda Vikatan began reviewing her performances regularly and she was constantly referred to by the press as ‘Nightingale’.
It was at this time she met Thiyagaraja Sadasivam, a freedom fighter and fairly well-known figure in Chennai’s political scene as a protégé of the late C Rajagopalachari, popularly known as Rajaji. They fell in love and married in Thiruneermalai, near Madras, in 1940. From then on, her career took a new direction.
Subbulakshmi’s first movie Sevasadanam was released in 1938 in which she acted as a poor girl married to a rich old man. It was followed by Shakuntalai in which she played the lead, a glamorous role teaming her with G N Balasubramanian, the most attractive intellect of that time.
http://www.rediff.com/news/2004/dec/11ms2.htm
S Subbulakshmi – M S AMMA Live at un 23rd Oct 1966 Concert JagadO
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7YmhFD381k