Arthur J. Robinson — or Mr. Okra, as pretty much everyone called him — who rolled each day through the streets of New Orleans in a loudly painted pickup-truck-cum-fruit-stand singing his sales pitch like the roving food vendors once common in the city, died on Thursday at his home there. He was 74.

The cause was a heart attack, said his daughter Sergio Robinson, who had in recent years taken to driving the route when her father’s health waned.

In neighborhoods rich and poor alike, you could hear the rising melody some minutes before Mr. Okra’s truck appeared: “I have ooooranges and bananas! I have eeeeeating pears and apples!”

Over tinny loudspeakers you would hear that he had cantaloupe, greens, squash and “the mango,” and soon the truck would come into view, a polychrome, mobile oasis in even the driest of food deserts.