Frankie Laine, a pop idol with an enormous voice and an even bigger catalog of hits, died yesterday at 93 in a San Diego hospital.

Laine was also celebrated for the wide range of styles that he covered. He was best known as a traditional pop singer of the late 1940s and early 1950s, a contemporary of fellow Italian-American superstars such as Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, and Dean Martin.

Yet he was proudest of his accomplishments as a jazz singer, mostly from the earlier part of his career; when asked to name his favorite album, he usually cited “Jazz Spectacular,” his 1955 collaboration with the great trumpeter Buck Clayton.

In the later part of his career, he was best known as a country singer and gained a whole new audience when he sang the theme for the classic Western “High Noon.” Soon he was singing over the titles of Western movies and TV shows, most famously the TV series “Rawhide,” which introduced the actor Clint Eastwood. He also sang the main title theme in Mel Brooks’s classic “Blazing Saddles,” although Mr. Brooks later told interviewers that he hadn’t told Laine it was a spoof.

Throughout, Laine’s singing was marked by a big, loud, belting voice; he was never known for his subtlety. He also was a successful songwriter, responsible for several classic songs, including the standard “We’ll Be Together Again.” His total worldwide sales lay somewhere north of 100 million records.

Born Francesco Paolo LoVecchio in Chicago in 1913, Laine was the first of eight children in an immigrant family. He was inspired to be a singer by youthful encounters with Bessie Smith and Al Jolson, but show business success was elusive at first. During the Depression, he hit the road to vie in dance marathons and even set a world record for dancing 156 straight days.

Laine moved to New York, where he once worked as a singer on WINS radio, and then to Los Angeles. He was “discovered,” he later said, when he sang Hoagy Carmichael’s “Rockin’ Chair” one night when the songwriter himself happened to be in the house.

In the late 1940s, Laine steadily climbed the ladder of showbiz success. He started as more or less a jazz singer on a small Los Angeles label (recording with the blues pianist Charles Brown in 1945) and gradually worked his way up to being a mass-market pop singer on Columbia Records by 1950.

Laine’s first hit was the ballad “That’s My Desire” (1947), yet he ascended to the major leagues when he consented to producer Mitch Miller’s wishes and sang the Western ballad “Mule Train,” which became a hit not only because of the song and Laine’s performance but because of the producer’s innovative use of sound effects – as Mr. Miller once told The New York Sun, “to help paint a picture in the listener’s head.”

Unlike his slightly younger colleague Sinatra, Laine rarely attracted much attention singing jazz or standards. Rather, he worked with producer Miller to fashion a distinct musical persona that Mr. Miller refers to as “the blue collar guy.” Nearly all of Laine’s hits were melodramatic, testosterone-driven blood-andthunder epics about men in hardworking situations – “Cry of the Wild Goose,” “That Lucky Old Sun” – and the evil women who drive them to bad ends, such as “Swamp Girl,” “Jezebel, and “Gambella (The Gambling Lady).”

Laine did record show tunes and classic Tin Pan Alley, but was better known for various kinds of pop permutations of the blues (“Pretty Eyed Baby “), country (“Your Cheatin’ Heart”), and gospel and religious songs (Ervin Drake’s “I Believe”). He helped popularize the South African folk writer Josef Marais with “Sugarbush” and “How Lovely Cooks the Meat.” The latter two were duets with Doris Day.

Laine charted no less than 39 hits during his Columbia Records period. He kept recording and performing even after his years on the charts were over. One of his later singles for the ABC label bore the colorful title “Dammit Isn’t God’s Last Name.” He appeared as an actor and or an onscreen performer in half a dozen films and even did commercials, including the well-known jingle “How do you handle a hungry man? Manhandlers!”

Laine kept going longer than most colleagues from the early 1950s, even into his 80s and 90s. He fought throat cancer in his 80s, reports a friend, the DJ Michael Anthony, and returned to the stage at 92.

His last public performance, in 2006, was on the PBS documentary series “Moments to Remember: My Music” in which he reprised his first hit, “That’s My Desire.” Apparently, his desire was to keep performing and pleasing his fans for as long as humanly possible.