Pakistan's melody queen Noor Jehan dies

Pakistan's top female singer, Noor Jehan, has died in the port city of Karachi after a protracted illness.

She was seventy-four.

Noor Jehan who started her career as an actress ands singer in her teens, shot to fame because of her singing and won the Pakistani title of Melody Queen in the nineteen-seventy's. She also won popularity in Pakistan for singing marital songs during the country's nineteen-sixty five and nineteen-seventy-one wars with India Music critics attribute her enduring popularity to a firm training in the classical mode with a rare ability to blend it with pop trends in thousands of her renditions.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service