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>Ruth Brown, 78, a Queen of R&B, Dies
>
>By JON PARELES
>November 18, 2006
>New York Times
>
>Ruth Brown, the gutsy rhythm and blues singer whose career extended
>to acting and crusading for musicians' rights, died on Friday in Las
>Vegas. She was 78 and lived in Las Vegas.
>
>The cause was complications following a heart attack and a stroke she
>suffered after surgery, and Ms. Brown had been on life support since
>Oct. 29, said her friend, lawyer and executor, Howell Begle.
>
>"She was one of the original divas," said the singer Bonnie Raitt,
>who worked with Ms. Brown and Mr. Begle to improve royalties for
>rhythm and blues performers. "I can't really say that I've heard
>anyone that sounds like Ruth, before or after. She was a combination
>of sass and innocence, and she was extremely funky. She could really
>put it right on the beat, and the tone of her voice was just mighty.
>And she had a great heart."
>
>"What I loved about her," Ms. Raitt added, "was her combination of
>vulnerability and resilience and fighting spirit. It was not
>arrogance, but she was just really not going to lay down and roll
>over for anyone."
>
>Ms. Brown sustained a career for six decades: first as a bright,
>bluesy singer who was called "the girl with a tear in her voice" and
>then, after some lean years, as the embodiment of an earthy,
>indomitable black woman. She had a life of hard work, hard luck,
>determination, audacity and style. Sometimes it was said that R&B
>stood as much for Ruth Brown as it did for rhythm and blues.
>
>As the 1950s began, Ms. Brown's singles for the fledgling Atlantic
>Records - like "(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean" and "5-10-15
>Hours" - became both the label's bankroll and templates for all of
>rock 'n' roll. She could sound as if she were hurting, or joyfully
>lusty, or both at once. Her voice was forthright, feisty and ready
>for anything.
>
>After Ms. Brown's string of hits ended, she kept singing but also
>went on to a career in television, radio and movies ( including a
>memorable role as the disc jockey Motormouth Maybelle in John Waters
><http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/filmography.html?p_id=218832&inline=nyt-per> 
>
>'s "Hairspray") and on Broadway, where she won a Tony Award for her
>part in "Black and Blue." She worked clubs, concerts and festivals
>into the 21st century.
>
>"Whatever I have to say, I get it said," she said in an interview
>with The New York Times in 1995. "Like the old spirituals say, 'I've
>gone too far to turn me 'round now.' "
>
>Ms. Brown was born Ruth Weston on Jan. 12, 1928, in Portsmouth, Va.,
>the oldest of seven children. She made her debut when she was 4, and
>her father, the choir director at the local Emmanuel African
>Methodist Episcopal Church, lifted her onto the church piano. In
>summers, she and her siblings picked cotton at her grandmother's farm
>in North Carolina. "That made me the strong woman I am," she said in
>1995.
>
>As a teenager, she would tell her family she was going to choir
>practice and perform instead at U.S.O. clubs at nearby naval
>stations. She ran away from home at 17, working with a trumpeter
>named Jimmy Brown and using his last name onstage. She married him,
>or thought she did; he was already married. But she was making a
>reputation as Ruth Brown, and the name stuck.
>
>The big-band leader Lucky Millinder heard her in Detroit late in
>1946, hired her for his band and fired her in Washington, D.C. .
>Stranded, she managed to find a club engagement at the Crystal
>Caverns. There, the disc jockey Willis Conover, who broadcast jazz
>internationally on Voice of America
><http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/v/voice_of_america/index.html?inline=nyt-org> 
>
>radio, heard Ms. Brown and recommended her to friends at Atlantic
>Records.
>
>On the way to New York City, however, she was seriously injured in an
>automobile accident and hospitalized for most of a year; her legs,
>which were smashed, would be painful for the rest of her life. She
>stood on crutches in 1949 to record her first session for Atlantic,
>and the bluesy ballad "So Long" became a hit.
>
>She wanted to keep singing ballads, but Atlantic pushed her to try
>upbeat songs, and she tore into them. During the sessions for
>"Teardrops >From My Eyes," her voice cracked upward to a squeal. Herb
>Abramson of Atlantic Records liked it, called it a "tear," and after
>"Teardrops" reached No. 1 on the rhythm and blues chart, the sound
>became her trademark for a string of hits.
>
>"If I was getting ready to go and record and I had a bad throat,
>they'd say, 'Good!'," she once recalled.
>
>Ms. Brown was the best-selling black female performer of the early
>1950s, even though, in that segregated era, many of her songs were
>picked up and redone by white singers, like Patti Page and Georgia
>Gibbs, in tamer versions that became pop hits. The pop singer Frankie
>Laine gave her a lasting nickname: Miss Rhythm.
>
>Working the rhythm and blues circuit in the 1950s, when dozens of her
>singles reached the R&B Top 10, Ms. Brown drove a Cadillac and had
>romances with stars like the saxophonist Willis (Gator Tail) Jackson
>and the singer Clyde McPhatter of the Drifters. (Her first son,
>Ronald, was given the last name Jackson; decades later, she told him
>he was actually Mr. McPhatter's son, and he now sings with a
>latter-day lineup of the Drifters.)
>
>In 1955 Ms. Brown married Earl Swanson, a saxophonist, and had a
>second son, Earl; the marriage ended in divorce. Her two sons survive
>her: Mr. Jackson, who has three children, of Los Angeles, and Mr.
>Swanson of Las Vegas. She is also survived by four siblings: Delia
>Weston of Las Vegas, Leonard Weston of Long Island and Alvin and
>Benjamin Weston of Portsmouth.
>
>Her streak of hits ended soon after the 1960s began. She lived on
>Long Island, raised her sons, worked as a teacher's aide and a maid
>and was married for three years to a police officer, Bill Blunt. On
>weekends she sang club dates in the New York area, and she recorded
>an album in 1968 with the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Big Band. Although her
>hits had supported Atlantic Records - sometimes called the House That
>Ruth Built - she was unable at one point to afford a home telephone.
>
>The comedian Redd Foxx, whom she had once helped out of a financial
>jam, invited her to Los Angeles in 1975 to play the gospel singer
>Mahalia Jackson in "Selma," a musical about civil rights he was
>producing.
>
>She went on to sing in Las Vegas and continued a comeback that never
>ended. The television producer Norman Lear
><http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/filmography.html?p_id=99070&inline=nyt-per> 
>
>gave her a role in the sitcom "Hello, Larry." She returned to New
>York City in 1982, appearing in Off Broadway productions including
>"Stagger Lee," and in 1985 she went to Paris to perform in the revue
>"Black and Blue," rejoining it later for its Broadway run.
>
>Ms. Brown began to speak out, onstage and in interviews, about the
>exploitative contracts musicians of her generation had signed. Many
>hit-making musicians had not recouped debts to their labels,
>according to record company accounting, and so were not receiving
>royalties at all. Shortly before Atlantic held a 40th-birthday
>concert at Madison Square Garden in 1988, the label agreed to waive
>unrecouped debts for Ms. Brown and 35 other musicians of her era and
>to pay 20 years of retroactive royalties.
>
>Atlantic also contributed nearly $2 million to start the Rhythm and
>Blues Foundation, which pushed other labels toward royalty reform and
>distributed millions of dollars directly to musicians in need,
>although it has struggled to sustain itself in recent years.
>
>"Black and Blue" revitalized Ms. Brown's recording career, on labels
>including Fantasy and Bullseye Blues. Her 1989 album "Blues on
>Broadway" won a Grammy Award for best jazz vocal performance, female.
>She was a radio host on the public radio shows "Harlem Hit Parade"
>and "BluesStage." In 1995 she released her autobiography, "Miss
>Rhythm" (Dutton), written with Andrew Yule; it won the Gleason Award
>for music journalism. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of
>Fame in 1993.
>
>She toured steadily, working concert halls, festivals and cabarets.
>This year she recorded songs for the coming movie by John Sayles
><http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/filmography.html?p_id=110025&inline=nyt-per> 
>
>, "Honeydripper," and was about to fly to Alabama to act in it when
>she became ill.
>
>Ms. Brown never learned to read music. "In school we had music
>classes, but I ducked them," she said in 1995. "They were just a
>little too slow. I didn't want to learn to read no note. I knew I
>could sing it. I woke up one morning and I could sing."
><http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/jon_pareles/index.html?inline=nyt-per> 
>
>
>--
>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>Toyin Falola
>Department of History
>The University of Texas at Austin
>1 University Station
>Austin, TX 78712-0220
>USA
>512 475 7224
>512 475 7222  (fax)
>www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa
>
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