A pioneer for The Beatles and Abba

When The Beatles made their first visit to Stockholm in 1963 to appear on the Swedish TV show Drop In, they asked Lill-babs for her autograph. She was topping the bill and it never occurred to her to ask for their signatures in return. ‘‘That wasn’t something strange,’’ she said. ‘‘I was famous and really big in Sweden and Germany, and they were completely unknown.’’

She was one of Sweden’s biggest stars for more than 60 years, although by the mid-1970s Abba were giving her a run for her money.

She had a hand in their early career, too. Her 1971 hit song Welcome To The World was written and produced by Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson, then unknown, and featured all four future members of Abba as backing musicians and singers.

Although she sang April, April, Sweden’s entry in the Eurovision Song Contest in 1961, 13 years before Abba won with Waterloo, she never rivalled their overseas success. Further Englishlanguage singles made little impression.

However, in Sweden she reigned supreme, one of those names like France’s Johnny Hallyday and Germany’s Herbert Gronemeyer, superstars at home but little known in the English-speaking world. It was a mark of her status in Swedish popular culture that the main TV and radio channels cancelled scheduled programmes to broadcast tributes to her on the day she died.

She was born Barbro Margareta Svensson in Jarvso, 180 miles north of Stockholm, to Ragnar and Britta Svensson, and spent her first nine years in a cottage without running water. She sang in church and made her first public appearances singing patriotic songs to the accompaniment of an accordion.

At the age of 15 she was discovered singing on a local radio show by bandleader Simon Brehm. She lied to him about her age and persuaded him to take her to Stockholm, where she made her professional debut in 1954 under the stage name Lill-babs, performing in restaurants and making her first 78rpm recording, Min Mamma’s Boogie (My Mom’s Boogie).

An unplanned pregnancy resulted in a return to Jarvso, where she gave birth to a daughter, Monica, but she was soon back in Stockholm and had her first big hit in 1959 with Ar du kar i mej annu Klasgoran? (Do You Still Love Me, Klasgoran?). Sung in a thick regional accent, the song was written by Stikkan ‘‘Stig’’ Anderson, who would later put together and manage Abba.

She was married and divorced twice, first to the singer Lasse Berghagen from 1965 to 1968, with whom she had a daughter, Malin Berghagen, who is an actress; and then to the Norwegian footballer Kjell Kaspersen from 1969 to 1973. Their daughter Kristin Kaspersen is a television presenter in Sweden. Babs is also survived by her eldest daughter Monica, who has chosen to remain out of the public eye.

There were countless other lovers, chronicled in intimate detail in the Swedish press. When she appeared on the Swedish version of This Is Your Life in 1983, she was greeted by a lineup of 10 of her former lovers, all dressed in dinner jackets, and singing a parody of Do You Still

Love Me, Klas-goran? She was wounded by the stunt, but being the super-trouper that she was, she put on a brave face.

She never stopped working and every summer toured small Swedish towns, giving open-air concerts in local parks. – The Times