Arnellia Allen, whose eponymous University Avenue nightclub was known to many as the “Apollo of St. Paul,” died Thursday morning at age 79.

The cause was ovarian cancer, said her son Jerry Allen, with whom she was living in North St. Paul.

When Arnellia’s opened in October 1992, it was the only bar in the city owned by a black woman.

Over the next quarter-century, its stage hosted hundreds of R&B, blues, hip-hop, jazz and gospel acts, drawing comparisons to the legendary Apollo Theater in New York’s Harlem.

Allen’s patrons included Prince, Minnesota Vikings football players and countless others whose names are less recognizable.

“It was a real destination for some,” said Jerry Allen, who worked part time at his mother’s nightclub. “But she was never really starstruck when those people came in.”

Born in 1938 to sharecropper parents, Allen grew up in rural Lena, Miss. She and her 14 brothers and sisters helped their parents raise cotton and livestock.

Allen left Lena for St. Paul in 1957, where she had two sons and began a career at the RockTenn paper factory.

A single mother, Allen waited tables and tended bar in the evenings to make ends meet.

“She would go from one job to the next one,” Jerry Allen said. “She’d come home, make us something to eat, take a nap and go back to work. I don’t know how she did it.”

By the mid-1980s, Allen was saving money for retirement, but when she heard through her hairdresser about a liquor license for sale, she decided to gamble her nest egg on the nightclub business.

“I worked nights in bars — the VFW, Acirema, Paul’s Place, the NCO Club — but after working so long for other people, I wanted to do it for myself,” she explained to the Pioneer Press in 2000.

Her first venture was the Metro Bar and Grill in downtown St. Paul. When her building was converted into office space in 1992, she opened Arnellia’s in the city’s Midway neighborhood.

It quickly developed a following, particularly among members of St. Paul’s African-American community.

They packed the house to see acts like Bobby “Blue” Bland, Shirley Murdock, the Blue Notes, Jr. Walker and the All Stars, Sounds of Blackness, Zapp and Alexander O’Neal.

Prince, who frequented Arnellia’s in the 1990s, once borrowed a guitar from a performing musician to jam on the bar’s stage.

Allen could be found at the club six days a week, but she wasn’t the type to seek the spotlight or glad-hand with her famous patrons.

A Pioneer Press pop music critic once wrote that “she seems incapable of engaging in the two most time-honored practices of club-ownerdom: self-promotion and schmoozing.”

But Allen was forced to step back from her business after being diagnosed with cancer in January.

“She missed it,” Jerry Allen said. “We did take her down there every once in a while, but it was taxing on her.”

Before Arnellia’s closed for good in April, Allen was feted during a four-day celebration at the club.

In addition to her son Jerry, Allen’s survivors include another son, eight siblings and seven grandchildren. Funeral arrangements were pending.

Ross Raihala contributed to this report.