Ruth Brown, the Original Queen of R&B and Royalty Reform Pioneer, Dies at 78

On November 18, 2006, eJazzNews reported the death of Ruth Brown, the singer whose run of hits in the 1950s made Atlantic Records known as “the house that Ruth built.” She died on November 17, 2006, at a hospital in Henderson, Nevada, near Las Vegas, at the age of 78, from complications after a stroke and a heart attack. The report gave as much weight to her later fight for unpaid R&B artists as to her records.

What the 2006 report said

The eJazzNews obituary opened with the announcement made for the family by Howell Begle, her longtime friend and lawyer. It listed the names she was known by: “the Girl with a Tear in Her Voice,” “the Original Queen of Rhythm & Blues” and “Miss Rhythm,” a name the article credited to Frankie Laine, the singer billed as Mr. Rhythm. It called her the first star made by Atlantic and dated her string of hits from 1949 to the end of the 1950s.

The page also carried the Associated Press obituary by Daisy Nguyen. It quoted Bonnie Raitt, who called Brown one of the most important and beloved figures in modern music, and recalled the years after the hits stopped, when Brown supported herself and her two sons, Earl Swanson and Ron Jackson, by working as a maid, a school bus driver and a teacher. It ended with her comeback from the mid-1970s on stage, on television and on radio.

The Atlantic years

Brown’s first hit was the ballad “So Long” in 1949. “Teardrops from My Eyes” (1950) spent 11 weeks at number one on the Billboard R&B chart, and she reached the top again with “5-10-15 Hours,” “(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean” (1953), “Oh What a Dream” and “Mambo Baby” (both 1954). Her first pop hit, “Lucky Lips” (1957), was written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which inducted her in 1993, says her two dozen hits put the young company on the map.

The royalty fight

In the 1980s Brown spoke out about R&B veterans who had never been paid royalties and about the way labels charged costs against their earnings. Working with Begle, a Washington lawyer, she built an alliance that included Jesse Jackson to press Atlantic and its owner, Warner Communications. In 1988 Atlantic agreed to pay back royalties to 35 of its early acts and to fund the creation of the Rhythm and Blues Foundation, a nonprofit that helps R&B artists. According to The Washington Post, Brown received $20,000 and had her recorded “debts” cancelled, and the company put up $1.5 million to start the foundation.

Stage, screen and later honors

The comeback took off in 1976, when Redd Foxx backed a production of the musical Selma in which she played Mahalia Jackson. She went on to play Motormouth Maybelle in John Waters’s film Hairspray (1988), won the 1989 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical for the Broadway revue Black and Blue, and won the Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, Female, for the album Blues on Broadway at the 1990 ceremony. She hosted the NPR programs Harlem Hit Parade and BluesStage, and her autobiography, Miss Rhythm (1996), won the Ralph Gleason Award for music journalism. NPR has described this later career as more focused on blues, jazz and show tunes; for the jazz side of that story, see our guide to the greatest female jazz singers.

The recognition continued after her death. The Recording Academy gave her a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016, and Rolling Stone included her in its 2023 list of the 200 greatest singers of all time.

Where to start listening

• Miss Rhythm (Greatest Hits and More) (Atlantic, 1989): the Atlantic singles, including “Teardrops from My Eyes” and “(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean.”
• Blues on Broadway (Fantasy, 1989): the Grammy-winning album from her comeback.
• R + B = Ruth Brown (Bullseye Blues, 1997): a later album that was nominated for the Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album.

Sources

• Adam Bernstein, “Ruth Brown, 78; R&B Singer Championed Musicians’ Rights,” The Washington Post, November 18, 2006.
• “‘Miss Rhythm’ Ruth Brown dies,” The Hollywood Reporter, November 2006.
• Robert Simonson, “Ruth Brown, Tony Winner for Black and Blue, Is Dead at 78,” Playbill, November 20, 2006.
• Ruth Brown, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
• Ruth Brown, Recording Academy (Grammy wins and nominations).
• “Forebears: Ruth Brown, The Fabulous Miss Rhythm,” NPR, October 23, 2017.

This page is based on an article from the original eJazzNews archive (2001 to 2018), with background and sources added in 2026. The original text is not republished here. You can read the original as it appeared on eJazzNews via the Internet Archive.
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