This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by James Quinn. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Born: 31 January 1932, Ireland
Died: 20 June 2011
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: Ottilie Barber
Patterson, Ottilie Anna (1932–2011), blues and jazz singer, was born on 31 January 1932 at 26 Carnesure Terrace, Comber, Co. Down, the youngest of four children (two boys and two girls) of Joseph Patterson (d. 1975), a driver and ex-British army soldier, and his wife Juliet (née ēgers) (d. 1987), a native of Latvia. Her parents met in the Caucasus, where Joseph was on military service, and married in Tbilisi in July 1919, before settling in Comber. Ottilie was an anglicisation of the Latvian name Ottilja. Music was in her blood: her paternal grandfather played melodeon and fife at family gatherings, and her mother loved to sing the folk songs of her homeland. Ottilie took classical piano lessons from the age of nine, but a year later saw the film Birth of the blues (1941) and was captivated by a funeral scene in which African-Americans sang the blues. Afterwards she spent her pocket money on the sheet music of any song with ‘blues’ in the title and played it on the front-room piano. Aged 11, she wowed American troops at the nearby Clandeboye camp with a rendition of ‘Boogie woogie bugle boy’. After the family moved to Avondale Gardens, Newtownards, Co. Down, Ottilie was educated locally at the Model Primary School and the Regent House School. She had a talent for drawing, and in 1949 won a scholarship to study art at Belfast Municipal College of Technology, where a fellow student, Derek Martin, introduced her to Bessie Smith, ‘Empress of the Blues’, and taught her to play boogie-woogie piano. By 1951 she was singing occasionally with Jimmy Compton’s jazz band in Belfast, but, seeking a more bluesy musical outlet, formed The Muskrat Ramblers with Martin and Al Watt in August 1952.
After graduating from college, she became an art teacher at Ballymena Technical College, Co. Antrim. Visiting London in summer 1954, she secured an audition with the up-and-coming Chris Barber jazz band, who were immediately impressed by her singing. Barber offered her a job, and she joined the band after Christmas 1954 on a salary of £10 a week. She first performed in public with the Barber band at the Royal Festival Hall on 9 January 1955 and received rave reviews from several newspapers, including one in Melody Maker from George Melly, who became a good friend. (She once reduced Melly to helpless laughter by serenading him with Orange marching songs on the top deck of a London bus.) Audiences and critics were astonished that this small, demure-looking white woman could sing the blues with such power and authenticity. For the next seven years she toured extensively with the Barber band, including tours in Ireland in 1955, 1956, 1960 and 1961. Ottilie often dueted with fellow band vocalist Lonnie Donegan, and sometimes accompanied herself on piano. She had great rapport with an audience and became one of the best-known female singers of the day and a key figure in the band’s success. On 12 November 1959 she and Chris Barber were married in London.
When American blues singers such as Big Bill Broonzy, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Muddy Waters and Sonny Boy Williamson toured Britain from the late 1950s with the Barber band, Ottilie performed alongside them and held her own. Visiting artists were impressed – sometimes even astounded – by her singing, and offered encouragement and praise. Ottilie was often compared to Bessie Smith (even by Louis Armstrong); although Bessie was a major inspiration, working with other singers helped her develop a distinctive style. Her 1957 performances with Rosetta Tharpe, for example, invigorated Ottilie’s singing with a gospel-inspired soulfulness. Such encounters also gave her a deeper understanding of the discrimination faced by black musicians, and the importance of the blues in consoling and empowering African- Americans. While she was walking down Oxford Street with Big Bill Broonzy, he asked if she was ashamed to be seen with him; she recalled her heartache as she told him she was proud.
After a US hit with Sidney Bechet’s ‘Petite fleur’ in 1959, the Barber band toured America regularly. The American press latched onto the novelty of a white Irishwoman singing the blues, the San Francisco Examiner describing her as ‘the world’s only Irish blues singer’. At the Washington jazz festival in 1962, the audience’s reaction to her was so enthusiastic that Duke Ellington’s arrival on stage was delayed. She recalled a visit to the Smitty’s Corner blues club in Chicago as a particularly memorable experience: after she performed before a black audience with Muddy Waters and his band, someone called out: ‘Hey, lady, you sing real pretty. How come you sing like one of us?’ (Harper, 162).
During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Ottilie performed regularly on British radio and television. She appeared in Richard Lester’s first film, the musical comedy It’s trad, Dad! (aka Ring-a-ding rhythm!) (1962), and as a nightclub singer in Gerry Levy’s fantasy drama Where has poor Mickey gone? (1964), for which she wrote and sang the film’s eponymous theme song. She made many recordings: notable singles included her debut ‘St Louis blues’ (1955), ‘Weeping willow blues’ (1955), ‘There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight’ (1959), and ‘Baby please don’t go’ (with Sonny Boy Williamson) (1964). Early albums included Blues (1955), That Patterson girl (1955), That Patterson girl: volume 2 (1956) and Ottilie (1959). From 1955 to 1964 she sang on most Barber band recordings, featuring on all twelve tracks of Chris Barber’s blues book: volume 1 (1961). She enjoyed singing traditional Irish songs (believing their blend of sorrowful lament and reckless abandon had much in common with the blues), and recorded Ottilie’s Irish night (1959), enlisting the help of her sister Jessie, some Ulster musicians, and the painters Gerard Dillon and George Campbell, who sang on several songs. She also recorded a jazz version of ‘The mountains of Mourne’ (1960) by Percy French, and the EP Ottilie swings the Irish (1960).
The Barber band played up to 200 dates a year and Ottilie increasingly found their tour schedules gruelling. She stoically endured delayed flights, long car and bus journeys, dingy hotels and squalid (or non-existent) dressing rooms, but as the only woman in the band, often felt excluded and ill at ease. Her chatty and gregarious nature masked a troubled and vulnerable personality that was highly sensitive to criticism and prone to anxiety and depression. She both dreaded and loved live performance: before going on stage she suffered excruciating nerves, but when she sang well and connected with the audience she found the experience exhilarating. That the source of such joy was also the source of such pain was a conflict she never managed to resolve. She suffered serious bouts of exhaustion in 1957 and 1959, and in October 1962 had a nervous breakdown, forcing her to rest for several months. Around this time she began to suffer throat problems, and was sometimes unable to speak. She took lessons with a voice coach to improve her singing technique, and relaxed by painting, woodcarving and writing verse, sometimes humorous but often marked by deep sadness. Taking the opportunity to experiment with her own musical projects, in 1964 she set to jazz and recorded Shakespearean verse such as ‘Tell me where is fancy bred’ and ‘Blow, blow, thou winter wind’. She drew on her eclectic musical and literary interests to record Spring song (1969) (reissued as 3000 years with Ottilie (1969)), an ambitious solo album with strong folk and psychedelic influences, writing several of its fourteen tracks, including songs about her unhappiness, such as ‘Please accept my apologies, Mrs Pankhurst’ and ‘The sound of the door as it closes’, and adapting others from Shakespeare, the Old Testament, and Gaelic and medieval Latin poetry.
When her health permitted, Ottilie performed occasionally with the Barber band, appearing at Dublin’s National Stadium (25 May 1970), the Lucerna Hall in Prague (22 October 1970), and the Belfast arts festival (November 1972). In 1973 she was diagnosed as suffering from a mild form of epilepsy and retired. For much of this period she lived in Kilbroney House, Rostrevor, Co. Down, but was often lonely there and in 1977 moved to Bangor to live with her mother; they moved to St Albans in 1981. She recovered sufficiently to appear to great acclaim at the Magnus jazz festival in Wembley in 1979, and sang at the Royal Dublin Society (RDS) on 5 April 1980 and the Cork jazz festival in October 1983. She and Barber had often been apart during her illnesses, and divorced in 1983. That year they performed a series of concerts in London, recorded for her album Madame Blues and Doctor Jazz (1984). By this time the damage to her vocal chords was evident, although some thought it added a rough earthiness to her singing. Earlier material was reissued in CD compilations such as Ottilie Patterson with Chris Barber’s jazzband 1955–1958 (1993), Back in the old days (1999) and That Patterson girl (2007), testifying to a continuing appetite for her work.
In 1988 she moved to Ayr in Scotland, where she lived quietly, refusing requests to perform in public. Always proud of her Ulster roots, she found consolation in Ayr’s proximity to Co. Down. She pursued her love of classical music (practising the piano daily), painted and sketched, watched the classic western movies she loved, and found a measure of contentment. After a fall in 2007, her health declined and she moved in 2008 to the Rozelle Holm Farm Care Home in Ayr, where she died on 20 June 2011. She was buried in Movilla Abbey cemetery, Newtownards, alongside her sister Jessie (d. 2002). She had insisted that no fuss be made and word be released only after her funeral. By then, her earlier fame had been largely forgotten, and her name was known only to a few jazz and blues aficionados. Among these, however, she was generally regarded as Ireland’s finest female blues singer, and among the best on this side of the Atlantic. On 23 February 2012 a blue plaque marking her birthplace in Comber was unveiled, followed by a sell-out commemorative concert at the La Mon Hotel, Castlereagh.