George Beverly Shea, who escaped a life of toil in an insurance office to become a Grammy-winning gospel singer and a longtime associate of the Rev. Billy Graham, died Tuesday in Asheville, N.C. He was 104.

His death was announced by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, in Charlotte, N.C., of which Shea was the official singing voice for more than a half-century. Canadian-born, he lived in Montreat, N.C. — for decades just a mile from the home of Graham, a close friend.

Through the Billy Graham crusades, as the stadium-size revival meetings begun by Graham are known, Shea was perhaps the most widely heard gospel artist in the world, singing before tens of millions of worshippers throughout the United States and around the globe.

He also appeared regularly on “The Hour of Decision,” Graham’s weekly radio broadcast, which began in 1950 and continues to this day.

On a more intimate scale, he sang at the prayer breakfasts of a series of U.S. presidents, including Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson and George H.W. Bush.

Shea, who was still singing as he embarked on his second century, was fond of saying that Graham would not let him retire, since nowhere in Scripture is the concept of retirement overtly addressed.

“I’ve been listening to Bev Shea sing for more than 50 years,” Graham told The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer in 1997, “and I would still rather hear him sing than anyone else I know.”

Shea’s vocal style was characterized by a resonant bass-baritone, impeccable diction, sensitive musical phrasing and an unshowmanlike delivery that nonetheless conveyed his own ardent religious conviction.

He recorded more than 70 albums, including “In Times Like These” (1962), “Every Time I Feel the Spirit” (1972) and “The Old Rugged Cross” (1978). In 1966 he won the Grammy Award for best gospel or other religious recording for his album “Southland Favorites,” recorded with the Anita Kerr Singers.

Shea received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Recording Academy, which administers the Grammys, in 2011.

Of the hundreds of songs he sang, Shea was most closely identified with “How Great Thou Art,” a hymn that became the de facto anthem of Graham’s ministry. In 1957, at a crusade in New York City, Shea, by popular demand, sang it on 108 consecutive nights.

Other songs for which he was known include “I’d Rather Have Jesus,” for which he composed the music, and “The Wonder of It All,” for which he wrote words and music.

George Beverly Shea, known as Bev, was born on Feb. 1, 1909, in Winchester, Ontario. His father was a Wesleyan Methodist minister; his mother was the organist in her husband’s church.

As a young man Shea attended Houghton College in Houghton, N.Y., but left before graduating to help support his family in the Depression. He found work in Manhattan as a clerk with the Mutual Life Insurance Co., a post he would hold for nearly a decade. Meanwhile he studied voice with private teachers.

During this period Shea entered an amateur talent contest on Fred Allen’s radio show, singing “Go Down, Moses.” He came in second — he was beaten by a yodeler — but the exposure led to offers to sing on commercial radio. He declined, ill at ease with the idea of a life in secular music.

In the late 1930s Shea moved to Chicago to join WMBI, the radio station of the Moody Bible Institute, as a staff announcer and singer. One day in 1943, a Wheaton College student named William Franklin Graham Jr., stopped by to tell Shea how much he loved his singing.

Before long Graham, who had become a preacher, recruited Shea to sing on his own religious radio show, “Songs in the Night.” From the mid-1940s to the early ‘50s, Shea was also the host of “Club Time,” a gospel show broadcast on ABC Radio.

In 1947 Shea joined Graham and Cliff Barrows, who would serve as Graham’s longtime music director, in the first Billy Graham Crusade, in Charlotte.

Shea was the author of several books, including the memoir “How Sweet the Sound,” written with Betty Free Swanberg and Jeffery McKenzie.