Peabo Bryson, who has died aged 75 after a stroke, earned himself the nickname of the Voice of Love, thanks to his smooth and mellifluous singing and his string of memorable duets with female singers, including Roberta Flack, Natalie Cole and Minnie Riperton. He credited Flack with giving him the key to the art of duetting.

“I think the secret to a really good duet is that you have to fall a little bit in love with your duet partner,” he told Tatler Asia in 2015. “I was very fortunate in finding a duet partner in Roberta Flack who really knew what a duet was, and knew how to play to a person’s strengths and weaknesses equally. I learned how to do a great duet from working with Roberta Flack because she’s that great.”

His 1983 album of duets with Flack, Born to Love, enshrined their collective musical chemistry and earned a gold disc, and its opening track, Tonight, I Celebrate My Love, gave them an international hit, reaching No 2 on the UK charts.

Bryson would enjoy a steady stream of hits through the late 1970s and 80s, both solo and with duet partners, but it was a pair of duets recorded for Disney movies at the start of the 90s that broke him through to a massive crossover audience. In 1991, he partnered with Céline Dion on Beauty and the Beast, the title song of the Disney film, and it was a Top 10 hit in both the US and the UK. It also earned both singers a Grammy award.

Bryson recalled how he and Dion gradually reached a successful rapport in the recording studio. “I looked across at her, and she looked back at me and what went on from the point of becoming relaxed was extremely intimate. You can’t buy that. You can record it, though.” The song was one of the benchmark moments of his career, and he commented that “I never ever got tired of listening to it.”

The Disney magic struck again in 1992 when he recorded A Whole New World for the animated feature film Aladdin, this time duetting with Regina Belle. The song topped Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart, and won the Grammy for song of the year (Bryson was Grammy-nominated eight times, including two wins).

He and Belle had previously worked together on the song Without You, from the film Leonard Part 6 (1987), which reached No 8 on the US Adult Contemporary chart, though the movie itself was beyond help. It was so cataclysmically awful that its star, Bill Cosby, was said to have purchased the TV rights so it could never be shown on television.

The song A Whole New World held special meaning for Bryson. “It’s a song that represents every hope and every promise that you will ever have,” he said. “I sang it in South Africa for the first time they allowed black South Africans to enter into the Miss South Africa beauty pageant.”

In 1997, Disney came calling again, bringing Bryson and Flack back together to sing As Long As There’s Christmas for the end credits of Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas. This was a straight-to-video sequel to the original film.

He was born Robert Peapo Bryson in Greenville, South Carolina, one of the four children ­of Marie Bryson. His father, Telford Copeland, was mostly absent during his upbringing, much of which he spent with his mother and maternal grandparents on their farm in nearby Mauldin.

Bryson began his progress towards a professional musical career at 14, when he became a backing singer with a local group, Al Freeman and the Upsetters. In an interview for Soul magazine in 1978, he described the group as “terrible”. He acquired the name “Peabo” when Freeman had trouble pronouncing “Peapo”, a French West Indian name.

Peabo’s mother encouraged his musical enthusiasm from an early age, taking him to see performers such as Sam Cooke and Little Richard. In 2022 he told the Philadelphia Tribune how “by the time I was five or six I could sing right along with them”, to the astonishment of other audience members who “couldn’t believe that music was coming out of a little boy.”

In his mid-teens, he joined Moses Dillard and the Tex-Town Display, playing the so-called Chitlin’ Circuit (a network of venues that hosted black American performers when racial segregation laws were in force). The group toured widely in the US, the Caribbean and Vietnam.

They recorded for the Bang record label, whose chief executive, Eddie Biscoe, could see that Bryson had great potential. He signed him to a contract and encouraged him to write and perform his own material, and Bryson also worked as a producer and arranger for other artists. In 1976 he released his own album, Peabo, on Bang’s subsidiary label, Bullet. Bryson commented that “I believe there are five exceptional songs on that album”, including I Can Make It Better, which reached No 23 on the R&B chart. He gave credit to Biscoe, saying: “Eddie showed me that I could write, that I could do a lot of things myself … I’ve believed in my own ability and I’ve managed not to compromise creatively.”

In 1977 he moved to Capitol Records. His first album for them was Reaching for the Sky, which was certified gold and heralded a streak of successful albums including a duet album with Natalie Cole, We’re the Best of Friends (1979), I Am Love (1981) and Born to Love (1983).

He scored regular hits on the R&B singles chart, with Reaching for the Sky climbing to No 6, I’m So Into You (No 2), and Gimme Some Time and What You Won’t Do for Love (both with Cole, reaching 8 and 16 respectively). His version of the Doobie Brothers hit Minute by Minute reached No 12. In 1984 Bryson reached No 10 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart with If Ever You’re in My Arms Again, which also topped the Adult Contemporary chart. His 1991 album Can You Stop the Rain (for the Columbia label) reached No 1 on the R&B album chart.

In 1985, he appeared on ABC TV’s long-running soap opera One Life to Live, and added his vocals to the show’s title song. Bryson’s version was subsequently adopted as the permanent theme. In 1998, he displayed another facet of his artistry when he played the role of Sportin’ Life in the Michigan Opera Theater-Detroit production of George Gershwin’s Porgy & Bess.

The following year he released the album Unconditional Love. His final album releases were Missing You (2007) and Stand for Love (2018), the latter produced by the production duo Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis.

In 2003, Bryson endured an investigation by the US Internal Revenue Service, who accused him of failing to pay $1.2m in taxes dating back to 1984. The authorities seized many of his possessions to sell at auction, including his Grammy trophies, a key to the city of Miami, a grand piano and hundreds of pairs of shoes. However, a family friend purchased the Grammy for A Whole New World in order to return it to Bryson.

In 2010 he married Tanya Boniface, formerly a member of the female British group the 411; they had a son, Robert (known as Kit).

He is survived by Tanya and Kit, his daughter Linda from a previous relationship, and three grandchildren.

• Robert Peapo (Peabo) Bryson, musician, singer and songwriter, born 13 April 1951; died 2 June 2026