Joshi's master was Rambhau Kundgolkar, known as Sawai Gandharva, a disciple of Ustad Abdul Karim Khan who had founded the Kirana gharana school of music. Joshi adhered to the style in which he had been taught but also cultivated a far wider audience.
He was born in the Dharwad district in what is now called Karnataka. His father was a teacher with many children, and life was not easy. His mother sang bhajans (Hindu hymns) to him when he was small, but her early death brought an end to that. But he then heard singing at the local temple and the morning call to prayer from a nearby mosque, and decided that he wanted to become a singer. In pursuit of this, at the age of 11, he ran away from home.
He managed to get to Gwalior, in Madhya Pradesh, where a music school had recently been established, and there heard classical music at its best. He then went on to Lucknow and Rampur, both centres of musical training.
Eventually his distraught father caught up with him, now a teenager, in Punjab and brought him home. In 1936, Sawai Gandharva accepted him as a pupil. Joshi lived with his master for four years, learning music and doing the housework in exchange.
In the early 1940s Joshi tried his luck in Mumbai and managed to get singing assignments with All India Radio. Joshi vocalised ragas in the khayal tradition and gained the station's seal of approval. But he wanted to widen his audience and decided on the bhajan form, singing in Hindi and his native Kannada as well as Marathi. He focused particularly on the compositions of the poets of the Marathi language.
When he was 22, HMV released his first recording of bhajans.
It was a success, and he went on to make many more.
He then moved into films, a medium most classical vocalists regarded as beneath them, working as a playback singer on Basant Bahar (1956) and Tansen (1958) (about the legendary musician at the court of Akbar). Acutely conscious of the diverse and pluralistic nature of Indian society, Joshi made efforts to highlight this in his art. He won many honours, including the Bharat Ratna (Jewel of India), the country's highest civilian award.
He was married twice and is survived by three sons and a daughter.
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