The singer and pianist Charles Brown, who has died aged 76, pioneered a post-war blues idiom sharply different in almost every respect from the bar-band blues of Chicago. Starting his career towards the end of the second world war in the clubs of Los Angeles, he united a velvety, wheedling voice and a sophisticated touch on piano in a style wholly of its moment, uncluttered with the musical and cultural mementos of the South intrinsic to the music of Muddy Waters or Howlin' Wolf.
Brown's first and prototypical success, Drifting Blues, recorded in 1945, with its opening line "drifting and drifting, like a ship out on the sea", crystallised black Americans' uncertainties about the future they had helped to secure, its cool, resigned tone signalling a new kind of alienation. Yet the songs he may be most lovingly remembered for are Merry Christmas Baby and its successor, Please Come Home For Christmas, which have become not just the only enduring seasonal blues but pop standards recorded by Elvis Presley, Bruce Springsteen and Bon Jovi.
Born on the Gulf Coast in Texas City, Texas, Brown was raised by his grandparents and learned to play classical pieces on his grandmother's piano. He left college with a degree in chemistry and moved to Los Angeles, where he won a talent contest playing Earl Hines's Boogie Woogie On The St Louis Blues and a classical encore. He was immediately hired to play at the singer Ivie Anderson's club, Ivie's Chicken Shack, with the stipulation that he play "nothing degrading like the blues".
Soon afterwards he was offered the piano stool in guitarist Johnny Moore's Three Blazers, a popular night-club group with the then almost statutory line-up of piano, guitar and bass. At this stage there were few hints of the blues inside Brown his early recordings were mostly pop songs and a treatment of the Warsaw Concerto but the nationwide success of Drifting Blues clarified the direction the Three Blazers would pursue, at least on record.
What remained unclarified was Brown's status. The records were generally issued under the group's name, with a small-print credit 'vocal by Charles Brown'. After a couple of years, as he would recount, "money and misunderstanding came into the picture. I had to start all over on my own." His first record after the split was titled, perhaps not accidentally, Get Yourself Another Fool. Brown was certainly no fool in the pursuit of his career: he had a succession of hits between 1947 and 1951, such as Merry Christmas Baby, Black Night and Seven Long Days, and was a headline act alongside Ray Charles in his youth a devoted imitator of Brown's style and Fats Domino on the rhythm and blues package shows that criss-crossed America.
Like many other black artists Brown lost ground to rock 'n' roll, and by the end of the 1950s he was virtually indentured to a mob-connected club owner in Newport, Kentucky, the entertainment section of Cincinnati. Whenever he raised the question of returning to the West Coast, his boss would say: "Charles, you're pretty and I love you, but you wouldn't look too good with a bullet in your brain."
The 1960s and 1970s brought some opportunities to record albums, which were largely disregarded by the international blues audience raised on the more aggressive music from Chicago. Eventually Brown quit the business altogether "did window-washing and little janitorial things" and took a small apartment in a senior citizens' housing centre in Berkeley. When his fortunes revived in the 1980s, however, he was able to rebuild a career with virtually rustless tools, his fingers still agile and his voice miraculously uncoarsened.
In albums such as One More For The Road, All My Life and Just A Lucky So And So, he declared his philosophy of the blues as a romantic and unaggressive music. "I never wanted to sing nothing about killing a woman, that lowdown blues," he said. "I had a more sophisticated blues." The warmth of Brown's music and personality attracted many admirers, both within and beyond the blues community.
Elvis Costello wrote I Wonder How She Knows for him, and he was joined on records by Bonnie Raitt, Dr John, Ruth Brown and John Lee Hooker. Raitt booked him for her tours, enabling him to reach larger audiences than were available to most blues artists, and she probably helped to secure him a lifetime achievement award from the Rhythm & Blues Foundation. He also received a heritage fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1997, and would have been honoured in March by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. On January 11, Raitt, Hooker, Dr John and other blues artists rallied at a benefit concert for him in San Francisco's Great American Music Hall, and he was allowed out of hospital to sit in a wheelchair in the wings.
Charles Brown married and divorced twice, but had no children. He earned certain people in the music business a great deal of money, no doubt more than he ever received himself, but disdained bitterness. "I never think over the mistreatments I've had," he said, "'cause I've had a wonderful life."
Charles Brown, blues singer and pianist, born September 13, 1922; died January 21, 1999