It was not the fact that Jane Little played the bass that was the most remarkable thing about her, although women remain the exception rather than the rule in orchestral bass sections.

It was not that she began her career at 16, after just two years of instruction, though that was remarkable enough in itself.

Nor was it that, at 4 feet 11 inches and 98 pounds, she stood more than a foot shorter, and weighed barely 70 pounds more, than her unwieldy charge.

The most remarkable thing of all was that Ms. Little had plied her trade without interruption from 1945 to the end of her life. That made her, when she passed the 71-year mark in February, by all accounts the longest-serving musician in the world to play with a single orchestra.

Ms. Little, who spent her career with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, died last Sunday at 87 at an Atlanta hospital after collapsing onstage during a performance by the orchestra. The concert was a Broadway tribute, and, as if the Fates had arranged it thus, Ms. Little — who over seven decades had performed like a trouper through times of illness, injury, and no pay — collapsed while playing “There’s No Business Like Show Business.’’

Over the years, from behind her bass (made circa 1705 by Italian master Carlo Giuseppe Testore, it stood more than 6 feet high and weighed some 30 pounds), she became a cherished figure in Atlanta, esteemed by concertgoers, their children, and their children’s children.

If Ms. Little’s instrument might have obscured another musician of comparable size, her sartorial élan left little danger of that prospect. A manager once dispatched her home to change after she arrived for a concert in a revealing blouse. (Ms. Little was then in her 70s.)

In an appreciation Friday on ArtsATL.com, an Atlanta cultural website, Michael Kurth, a fellow bassist in the orchestra, recalled fondly that Ms. Little would “rather sacrifice all the varnish on the back of her bass than wear jeans without rhinestones.’’

All this because, as an adolescent, she had been thwarted in her desire to play the clarinet.

Jane Findley was born in Atlanta on Feb. 2, 1929. Hers was a musical household: Her mother, a skilled self-taught pianist, was an accompanist at a dancing school run by one of Jane’s aunts.

As a child, Jane was keen to study music, but amid the Depression her family could not afford a piano of their own. Nor did things augur well for a career in dance.

“I wanted to be a ballerina, but to be a ballerina you need to have these nice feet, and mine just weren’t right,’’ Ms. Little told Atlanta magazine in February. “So my dreams were shattered there. But I still loved music, and I taught myself to play the piano on my next-door neighbor’s piano.’’

At 14, Jane took the musical aptitude test that her high school administered to all students.

She showed such prowess that, although she did not play an orchestral instrument, she was recruited for the school orchestra.

She asked for a clarinet, but there was an impediment: She was attending an all-girls’ school, and the inherent dearth of boys meant an inherent dearth of bassists. The school put a bass in her hands.

“Within a month, I was hooked,’’ Ms. Little said in the same interview. “It was awfully difficult to push those heavy strings down, and to carry the instrument around, but I just loved it.’’

In 1945, she became a charter member of the Atlanta Youth Symphony. The city had no “adult’’ orchestra then: An ensemble known as the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra had been convened in the 1920s, but between the advent of talking pictures and the coming of the Depression it had not survived the decade.

Ms. Little played her first concert with the youth symphony on Feb. 4, 1945, two days after her 16th birthday.

The ensemble gradually began recruiting adult professionals and in 1947 was renamed the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.

She continued in its ranks, through her student days at the University of Georgia and what is now Georgia State University, and through several years of summer study in Chicago with a member of the Chicago Symphony’s bass section.

Atlanta Youth Symphony musicians received no pay; in the orchestra’s early years as a professional ensemble, members drew a salary of $35 every other week.

What sustained Ms. Little, besides the music itself, was the prospect of record-breaking professional longevity: The previous record-holder, Frances Darger, a violinist, had been associated with the Utah Symphony for 70 years, playing there continuously except for a single year, when she lived out of state. Darger, who joined the orchestra in 1942, retired in 2012, at 87.

“Wouldn’t it be neat?’’ Ms. Little recalled thinking of the prospect of making the record books.

“A lot of people do crazy things like sitting on a flagpole for three days,’’ she told The Post. “I just kept on. It was just me and the lady in Utah. So finally, I said, ‘I’m going to do this.’’’

Ms. Little’s husband, Warren Little, whom she married in 1953, died in 2002. She leaves no immediate family members.