- Lived:
- 1408–1503 by the temple's traditional reckoning · born in Tallapaka village, Kadapa (Cuddapah) district of Rāyalasīma, Andhra → the rest of the life happened on and around the Tirumala hill at Tirupati
- Field:
- music and poetry — inventor of the Telugu saṅkīrtana, the short devotional song-lyric from which the whole South Indian song tradition descends
- The Big Idea:
- A song a day to one god, for about eighty years — and inside those songs, sung from the richest temple in India, some of the plainest words ever set down against caste: one Brahman, one and only, in the king and the servant alike.
- In their words:
- "Brahman is one — the supreme Brahman is one and only one." (the refrain brahmamokkaṭe parabrahmamokkaṭe; the rendering is ours)
- If you remember one thing:
- Twelve thousand of his songs survived four centuries sealed on copper plates in a temple vault — the words intact, the melodies lost with the throats that carried them — so that every "Annamayya song" you hear today is his poetry in twentieth-century music, a duet across five hundred years.