In the last year of his life, the rhythm and blues singer Nappy Brown, who has died aged 78, was honoured by the state of South Carolina, nominated for two awards by the Blues Foundation, featured on the cover of Living Blues magazine and invited on to Garrison Keillor's radio show, A Prairie Home Companion. That flash flood of recognition may have compensated a little for the dry decades of obscurity through which this once popular and influential artist had passed.
His heyday was the second half of the 1950s, when he had a run of hits, beginning in 1955 with Don't Be Angry, which reached No 2 on the R&B chart and - despite a pallid but inevitably bigger-selling cover version by the white group the Crew Cuts - reaching the US pop top 20. The song introduced his trademark "li-li-li", a faux stutter with something of the rhythmic punctuating effect of Buddy Holly's hiccup. Elvis Presley was one of his admirers.
Like many of his peers, Brown began his career singing at the neighbourhood church in his hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina, and later with the Selah Jubilee Singers. It was as a member of the Heavenly Light Gospel Singers that he auditioned in 1954 for Savoy records. Herman Lubinsky, the owner, listened to him and said, "Nappy, is there any way you could sing the blues?" "I was just a poor boy from the south," Brown recalled, "and wanted to make some money. So I said yes." It was not a taxing decision: Brown had been listening to blues on jukeboxes since he was a teenager, and idolised the blues crooner Charles Brown and the gruff singer and alto player Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson. He had even written a risqué blues, Lemon Squeezin' Daddy, "but at that time you couldn't put stuff like that on record," he explained.
Lubinsky enjoyed the singer's vocal tricks, such as adding "la" to words (according to Brown, he pretended to hear his "baby-la" as the Yiddish bubeleh) and kept him on Savoy's books for some eight years. In 1957 Brown revived the old blues The Night Time is the Right Time, only to see Ray Charles make a hit out of it for the rival Atlantic label. Savoy retaliated by having Brown move in on the teenage market Atlantic were reaching with Big Joe Turner, though some of his material, like Goody Goody Gum Drop or Piddily Patter Patter (covered by the white pop diva Patti Page), was trivial.
By the early 60s, however, Brown was an R&B absentee, for reasons that were never entirely clear; it was rumoured that he was in jail, or dead. He had, he said later, simply given up the entertainment business and returned to North Carolina and gospel music. It would be 20 years before blues audiences heard him again, first in Europe, which he visited several times in the early 1980s, then in the United States on an album for Alligator, followed by several others for small labels in both the US and England. Best of Both Worlds, a 1995 album with a younger singer, Kip Anderson, was made primarily for the "beach music" scene that was then active in the coastal resorts of South Carolina.
Another decade of near-silence followed before Brown found the musicians and the label to help him make an uncompromised comeback. Long Time Coming, issued by Blind Pig last September, found him applying his well-cared-for voice to a selection of blues and R&B ballads, accompanied with impeccable period accuracy by the young guitarist Sean Costello. The album was critically well received and the job opportunities it brought filled many dates in Brown's diary.
"I feel like I'm back on top," he told his producer and longtime friend Scott Cable. "He was at first incredulous about it," says Cable, "and always felt very lucky to have a second chance in the spotlight. And he was always very demonstrative about how appreciative he was of all the media attention, the fan interest, and the help of the record label in reviving his career."
In Tunica, Mississippi, in May Brown thrilled the audience with his performance at the annual Blues Music awards. It was his last major engage-ment: in June, he went into hospital with health problems from which he never recovered. He is survived by his wife Ann.