Ruth Brown

Ruth Alston Brown, born Ruth Weston on January 12, 1928, in Portsmouth, Virginia, was an American singer-songwriter and actress who became one of the defining figures of rhythm and blues music. The eldest of seven siblings, she grew up in a household shaped by her father, a dockhand who also directed the choir at Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Brown attended I. C. Norcom High School and drew early inspiration from singers Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, and Dinah Washington. At seventeen, she left Portsmouth with trumpeter Jimmy Brown, whom she married, to perform in bars and clubs. After a brief stint with Lucky Millinder's orchestra, she secured a nightclub engagement in Washington, D.C., arranged by bandleader and manager Blanche Calloway, Cab Calloway's sister. Willis Conover, later a disc jockey for the Voice of America, saw Brown perform alongside Duke Ellington and recommended her to Atlantic Records executives Ahmet Ertegun and Herb Abramson. A car accident prevented her from auditioning as planned and resulted in a nine-month hospitalization; she signed with Atlantic Records from her hospital bed.

Brown's recording career at Atlantic launched in earnest in 1949 when her audition performance of "So Long" became a hit. The following year, "Teardrops from My Eyes," written by Rudy Toombs and recorded in New York City in September 1950, reached number one on the Billboard R&B chart for eleven weeks, earning her the nickname "Miss Rhythm." Between 1949 and 1955, her records appeared on the R&B chart for a cumulative total of 149 weeks, and she ultimately accumulated twenty-one Top 10 hits, five of which reached number one. Her subsequent charting singles included "I'll Wait for You" and "I Know" in 1951, "5-10-15 Hours" and "(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean" in 1953, and "Oh What a Dream" and "Mambo Baby" in 1954. She ranked number one on the Billboard 1954 Disk Jockey Poll for Favorite R&B Artists. Her crossover into pop came with "Lucky Lips" in 1957, written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, which reached number six on the R&B chart and number twenty-five on the pop chart. The 1958 follow-up, "This Little Girl's Gone Rockin'," written by Bobby Darin and Mann Curtis, reached number seven on the R&B chart and number twenty-four on the pop chart. Atlantic Records' commercial success during this period was so closely tied to Brown's output that the label became known as "the house that Ruth built." Brown performed at the tenth Cavalcade of Jazz concert at Wrigley Field in Los Angeles on June 20, 1954, sharing the bill with Count Basie, Louis Jordan, and Perez Prado, among others.

During the 1960s, Brown stepped away from public performance and lived as a housewife and mother. She returned to music in 1975 at the urging of comedian Redd Foxx, which led to a series of acting engagements in television, film, and stage. She had a recurring role in the second season of the sitcom Hello, Larry, playing neighbor Leona Wilson, and appeared in John Waters's 1988 cult film Hairspray as Motormouth Maybelle Stubbs, a record promoter and mother of Seaweed and L'il Inez.

Brown's Broadway career spanned from 1982 to 1989. She appeared in The Amen Corner and starred in Blues in the Night and Black and Blue. Her performance in Black and Blue earned her the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical in 1989, and the original cast recording of that production won a Grammy Award. That same year, she released the album Blues and Broadway, which won a Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, Female. Brown also hosted the radio program Blues Stage, broadcast on more than two hundred NPR affiliates, for six years beginning in 1989.

Beyond her performing career, Brown became a prominent advocate for musicians' rights. Her efforts beginning in 1987 to address royalty and contract inequities led directly to the founding of the Rhythm and Blues Foundation in 1988. She was among the first recipients of the Foundation's Pioneer Award in 1989. Brown was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993, the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame in 1992, and the Virginia Music Hall of Fame in 2013. Her 1995 autobiography, Miss Rhythm, received the Ralph Gleason Award for Music Journalism in 1996. She toured with Bonnie Raitt in the late 1990s and appeared on Raitt's 1995 live DVD Road Tested. In 2016, she received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 2017 she was inducted into the National Rhythm and Blues Hall of Fame. Rolling Stone ranked her at number 146 on its 2023 list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time.

Brown died on November 17, 2006, in a Las Vegas-area hospital from complications following a heart attack and stroke suffered after surgery. She was seventy-eight years old. A memorial concert was held on January 22, 2007, at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, New York. She is buried at Roosevelt Memorial Park in Chesapeake City, Virginia.