Barbara Cook, a lyric soprano whose rousing songs and romantic ballads touched America’s heart in an odyssey that began in the golden age of Broadway musicals, overcame alcoholism, depression and obesity, and forged a second life in cabarets and concert halls, died early Tuesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 89.

Adam LeGrant, her son and only immediate survivor, said the cause was respiratory failure.

In 2011, six decades after her Broadway debut in a short-lived musical, Ms. Cook received Kennedy Center Honors from President Barack Obama. It had been a remarkable journey from a broken home in Atlanta to national renown as a singer who never learned to read music but became one of the finest emotive interpreters of the Great American Songbook.

[ Read an appraisal of Barbara Cook’s career ]

While her voice had darkened over the years, critics said that even in her mid-80s it retained the richness, clarity and expressiveness of the Broadway ingénue she had been in 1957, when she rendered “Goodnight, My Someone” and a soaring “Till There Was You” as the original Marian, the librarian, in Meredith Willson’s blockbuster “The Music Man.”

Ms. Cook was an ideal leading lady in the musicals of the 1950s and ’60s. She was slender and blond, with a scrubbed schoolgirl charm and a radiant voice that ranged from the patter of comedy to the edges of aria. She won a Tony Award for “The Music Man” and starred in Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide” (1956), “She Loves Me” (1963) and revivals of “Carousel” (1957), “The King and I” (1960) and “Show Boat” (1966).