Aesthetics discussion question

(DJ voice) Here's a little barstool aesthetics to ease into Saturday afternoon:

Can a musician who is primarily an interpreter/performer earn a place among the greatest musicians?

I'm thinking about artists like Billie Holiday, Johnny Cash, Glenn Gould, and Elvis. These great artists wrote little of the material they performed, but they were intellectual and aesthetic innovators whose creative contributions have had lasting influence. Thad and I were debating about whether people of this caliber should be eligible for "top ten lists" of the greatest musicians of the 20th Century. We weren't arguing about the stature of these particular artists, but rather whether an artist can contribute enough through interpretation and performance to be counted among the all time "greats."

Thad touched off a firestorm of controversy by arguing that absolute greatest musicians are those who write and perform their own work, e.g. Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Bob Dylan, Prince, etc.

(Note: Thad differentiates between improvisation and interpretation. He doesn't think that musicians necessarily have to write their own music down in order to be counted as writer/performers.)

I concede that, all other things being, equal, someone who combines brilliant writing and virtuosic performance is probably a more important artist that someone who is exclusively a brilliant interpreter/performer. However, when we're talking "top ten" lists, we're comparing lifetime acheivments. If you look at what some of the great interpreters have contributed to music, I think their accomplishments have earned them a place among the truly great artists. Writer/performers have an edge when you're forced to choose arbitrarily short list, but I'm not prepared to exclude interpreters from contention.

Discuss.