A girl from Southwest Philadelphia who became the Godmother of Soul

Before she was Patti LaBelle she was Patricia Louise Holte, the second-youngest child of a railroad worker and club performer and a domestic worker in Southwest Philadelphia. She joined the Beulah Baptist Church choir at ten and sang her first solo two years later, all the while soaking up R&B and jazz at home.

At sixteen she won a talent contest at John Bartram High School, and that win became a group, the Ordettes. In 1962 new voices arrived: Cindy Birdsong, Sarah Dash and Nona Hendryx. When they auditioned for a local label owner, Harold Robinson, he agreed to work with them after hearing her sing “I Sold My Heart to the Junkman”, even though he had first judged her too dark and too plain. He had them record as the Blue Belles, and Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles were born.

The name shortened to Labelle in the 1970s, and the group released the US number-one hit “Lady Marmalade”. When they disbanded in 1977, she started over alone. Mainstream success came in the 1980s with singles such as “If Only You Knew”, “New Attitude” and “Stir It Up”, and in 1986 she landed both a US number-one album, Winner in You, and a number-one single, “On My Own”, a duet with Michael McDonald.

She won a Grammy in 1992 for Burnin' and another in 1999 for the live album Live! One Night Only, and in 2008 she reunited with her old Labelle bandmates for Back to Now. Along the way she acted in A Soldier's Story, starred in her own sitcom, and gave her name to cookbooks and a sweet potato pie that went viral. Yet it is the voice that lasts: a dramatic soprano known for power, a wide modal register and emotion, carried across seven decades.