R&B pioneer Ruth Brown, 78

Ruth Brown, the pioneering singer whose 1950s hits, including "Teardrops From My Eyes" and "(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean," helped establish the rhythm-and-blues form and Atlantic Records as the genre's pre-eminent record label, died Friday in a Las Vegas-area hospital. She was 78.

Ms. Brown, a Grammy and Tony award winner, died from complications after a heart attack and stroke earlier in the week.

Much of her work in the past 20 years had been as a driving force to get unpaid royalties and musical credit for R&B and blues musicians, many of whom had failed to be adequately compensated early in their careers.

She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993.

Despite being one of the top-selling R&B singers of the early 1950s, Ms. Brown had to support herself and her two children through a variety of menial jobs in the 1960s and '70s, after musical tastes changed and other artists took over the charts.

"She had a hard life," longtime Atlantic Records producer Jerry Wexler said Friday. "She had to drop out for a while and work as a maid. She'd be cleaning people's houses and then hear her records on the air."

Her trademark squeal in her most famous hit, "(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean," spawned imitators.

"Little Richard once told me he got his squeal from Ruth Brown," said Wexler, who produced dozens of her Atlantic recordings, mostly with label founder Ahmet Ertegun.

Her comeback started in 1988. She won acclaim in the R&B musical "Staggerlee" and won a Tony Award in 1989 for best actress in the Broadway revue "Black and Blue."

She also played a deejay in the 1988 cult movie "Hairspray." She won a Grammy in 1990 for best jazz vocal performance for the album "Blues on Broadway."

Ms. Brown, who was born in Portsmouth, Va., was married four times. She is survived by her two sons, three brothers and a sister.