It was a chance encounter in 1945 with jukebox operator-cum-recording entrepreneur Jules Bihari that led classically trained Hadda Brooks, who has died after heart surgery aged 86, away towards the status of "Queen of the boogie".
Bihari heard her practising in a Los Angeles music store, and put up the cash to record her - launching Modern Records in the process. Brooks achieved success with her many recordings, with on one occasion, a contingent from the Count Basie Orchestra as accompaniment.
Her version of That's My Desire, complete with her sultry, torch-singer vocal, made it to number four in Billboard's "race" chart in 1947. Club and cabaret audiences loved her blend of boogie numbers and ballads, their success prompting tours with the Artie Shaw and Charlie Barnet orchestras, a number of film shorts for the African-American market and cameo Hollywood appearances. Brooks featured as a nightclub entertainer in the George Brent and Carole Landis film, Out Of The Blue (1947), then as a lounge performer in Humphrey Bogart's In A Lonely Place (1950) and, with Kirk Douglas and Lana Turner, in The Bad And The Beautiful (1952).
Brooks defied the usual blues stereotype of hard times and grinding poverty. Born into a middle class African-American family in Los Angeles, she was the elegant daughter of a doctor mother and a father who was among the first blacks to gain office as a local deputy sheriff. She learned a classical piano repertoire from the age of four, and was educated at a largely white high school, later studying at Northwestern University, Chicago.
In 1940, she married Earl "Shug" Morrison, of the Harlem Gobetrotters, but was widowed within a year. She then worked as a rehearsal pianist at tap-dancer Willie Covan's dance studio - where the clients included Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly - before meeting Bihari. When the hit records stalled, she broke away from Bihari, although she always described him as "the love of my life". Later, she recorded, less successfully, for the London and Okeh labels, and, after a long retirement, for DRG in the 1990s.
In 1950, with her own series running on KLAC-TV, Brooks claimed to be the first African-American woman to achieve such recognition. She toured internationally as a speciality performer with the Harlem Globetrotters package, and spent much of the 1960s in Hawaii and Australia, where she also had her own television show.
Returning to Los Angeles in 1970, she found it difficult to pick up the threads, and summarily retired. But, persuaded back on stage by writer Richard Lamparsky in 1986, she found audiences in New York and Los Angeles flocking to hear her sophisticated stylings.
Inducted in the Rhythm and Blues Foundation Hall of Fame in 1993, the regal Brooks completed a sell-out engagement at another local club as recently as late last summer.
· Hadda Brooks Hapgood, pianist and singer, born October 2 1916; died November 21 2002