Ruth Brown was born Ruth Alson Weston in Portsmouth, Virginia. She was raised in Virginia and in Macon, North Carolina, where she spent summers helping her grandmother sharecrop. Brown developed an interest in music very young, sneaking out to hear shows and eventually, to sing out herself. “I dearly wanted to discuss my developing interest in singing for a living,” she writes in her autobiography, “but I knew Dad would hit the roof if I did.”

Following World War II, Brown acquired both the surname “Brown” and some additional performing experience when ran away from home and became half of a short-lived husband-and-wife performing team “Brown and Brown” with trumpeter Jimmy Earle Brown. After that, she toured for a brief time with Lucky Millinder and his band, but Millinder was unhappy with her performance and fired her—leaving her in Washington, DC, to fend for herself.

As a favor, Blanche Calloway offered her a gig singing for tips in her club, Crystal Caverns, to raise the funds she needed to return home to Portsmouth. Duke Ellington, Sonny Til of the Orioles, and Willis Conover of Voice of America happened to be in town one evening and heard her there. Willis called Ahmet Ertegun and Herb Abramson at Atlantic Records, excited about the new talent they had just discovered. Atlantic sent a representative to see Brown, and then offered her a contract; Blanche Calloway became her manager. En route to New York to sign the contract and perform at the Apollo, however, Brown was in a car accident that crushed her legs. She signed a contract with Atlantic in 1949 from her hospital bed. She spent months recovering and had to wear leg braces for a time afterward. Atlantic Records helped to foot the medical bills.

Brown’s success for Atlantic was such that the label has famously been called “the House that Ruth Built.” She would eventually cut more than one hundred sides for the label. Initially, Brown recorded mainly ballads and jazz standards. Her first #1 R&B hit, “Teardrops from My Eyes,” marked a firm turn in her style toward the “hot” rhythmic style for which she became famous. Hits including “5-10-15 Hours” (1952) and “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean” (1953) are arguably among the first of the rock and roll era. Her first major crossover success came with “Lucky Lips” (1957), which made it to the Billboard Top 100 list. She recalls in her autobiography that the success of that song plus her involvement with rock and roll “supershows” such as Alan Freed’s was that “I sang ‘Lucky Lips’ seven times in one day. And nothing else! It was a fiasco, a rock ’n’ roll circus, but it was a huge business.”

Brown also toured widely throughout the fifties and early sixties, which she later credited for her success. “One of the reasons that I was what we considered popular, hot, ‘red hot,’” she said in an oral history for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, “was the fact that I was very involved—I was visible. I was one of the few female artists that made appearances in the deep South. Every place that there was a stage, no matter what the economic situation was, even in the midst of the worst period of segregation—I was always there. I made personal appearances.” She would often stay in private homes, and she recalls changing her clothes in the car when denied dressing rooms.

In the late 1960s into the 1970s, Brown’s musical career faltered somewhat, and she was also not receiving royalties from her early records. “With the passing of the sixties—it was in that period that found out that I had to do many other things,” she told Bob Santelli in an interview. “I became a domestic, I drove a school bus, I took care of the elderly, I worked as a counselors in drug abuse. I worked in Headstart, I worked in kindergarten with the children. I did whatever was necessary to maintain a livelihood for myself and my two children. I did it with dignity then, and I am not ashamed of it now.”

Her musical career, however, kicked back into gear in the later half of the 1970s. She began a different kind of stage career in 1975, when she played Mahalia Jackson in the musical Selma. In 1987, she appeared in Allen Toussaint’s R&B musical Staggerlee. Her next role was in Black & Blue at the Theatre Musical de Paris, and she was cast in the Broadway production of the show in 1989. According to Playbill, the show ran for 829 performances. She also appeared in the 1988 John Waters film Hairspray, starring as Motormouth Maybelle.

Brown was a tireless advocate for musicians’ rights. Her own struggles to receive fair compensation for her early records were the impetus for the creation of the Rhythm & Blues Foundation—a non-profit organization dedicated to providing financial and medical assistance to musicians as well as educational outreach and other efforts to preserve the cultural legacy of rhythm and blues.

Brown passed away in 2006, but not without first enjoying major accolades for her work: she received a Tony Award for her performance in Black & Blue in 1989—the same year she received one of the inaugural Pioneer Awards from the Rhythm & Blues Foundation—and she was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1993.