Heavily influenced by Billy Eckstine, Prysock’s rich baritone enabled him to sustain his career over five decades. Despite his relative lack of record success, he was a mainstay of the cabaret and concert-hall circuits. He moved to Hartford, Connecticut, to work in the aircraft industry in the early forties and while singing with a local band was spotted in 1944 by bandleader Buddy Johnson who signed him as male vocalist. Prysock sang on several of Johnson’s hits first on Decca (‘Jet My Love’, 1947  and   ‘I Wonder Where Our Love Has Gone’, 1948) and Mercury (‘Because’, 1950).

   In 1952 Prysock went solo and signed with Decca. He had an immediate R&B hit, ‘I Didn’t Sleep a Wink Last Night’ (1952), but, his popularity as a live performer with black audiences notwithstanding, he was essentially a band and ballad not an R&B singer. Nonetheless, he recorded R&B classics like Roy Brown’s ‘Good Rocking Tonight’. In the sixties, Prysock joined Old Time records, where he had an R&B hit with a fine version of Ray Noble’s thirties ballad, ‘The Very Thought of You’ (1960) and a pop hit with ‘It’s Too Late Baby, It’s Too Late’ (1965) and Verve (‘A Working Man’s Prayer’, 1968). In the seventies, in the wake of successful reissues of his recordings, he had a surprise disco hit with ‘When Love Is New’ (Old Time, 1977) and in 1985, recorded his first new album, Arthur Prysock (Milestone) in almost a decade to critical and commercial approval.