The singer Ottilie Patterson belonged to the first generation of British blues musicians, one of a small but determined group of pioneers who popularised black American music in the 1950s and laid the foundations for the rhythm and blues boom of the early 1960s, which catapulted the likes of the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton and the Yardbirds to fame.
The central cog in this early movement was Chris Barber, whose jazz ensemble at one time or another featured most of the leading early figures in British blues, including Alexis Korner and Lonnie Donegan, who both served in the band alongside Patterson.
Barber came to the blues via traditional jazz and his band’s approach to the music was substantially different from the electric-guitar-led sound of the beat groups that followed in the 1960s. His trombone-led ensemble gave great prominence to the featured lead vocalist and Patterson — who was also Barber’s wife — sang with his band for 18 years, between 1955 and 1973. During this time she recorded versions of such American blues classics as St Louis Blues, Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out and Beale Street Blues. But she also recorded trad jazz standards such as Down by the Riverside and When the Saints Go Marching In, Irish ballads, novelty items and pop material such as Fats Domino’s Blueberry Hill.
Yet despite her diverse repertoire, it is as a singer of the blues that she will be best remembered. As a Belfast art teacher, she showed a profound and perhaps surprising emotional empathy with a form created by black sharecroppers in the racially segregated world of the American South, a fact that was recognised by the jazz vocal trio Dave Lambert, Jon Hendricks and Annie Ross, who introduced her to the audience at the 1959 Monterey Jazz Festival in California with a song in her honour:
I’ve heard the blues in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Florida, Texas and Tennessee, But when I heard of blues in Ireland, Well that was really news to me . . .
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Yes the blues sure do get around, . . . And here’s Miss Ottilie Patterson Straight from Belfast Town.
Anna Ottilie Patterson was born in Comber, Co Down, Northern Ireland, in 1932 to an Irish father and a Latvian mother. Both her parents were musical, and she trained as a classical pianist from the age of 11, although she never had any formal training as a singer and eventually studied art at Belfast College of Technology.
It was as a student in 1949 that a college friend introduced her to the blues, via 78 rpm recordings of pianists such as Jelly Roll Morton, Meade Lux Lewis and the singer Bessie Smith, who became her main vocal influence. Two years later in 1951 she joined the Belfast-based Jimmy Compton’s Jazz Band as a featured vocalist. But Patterson wanted to concentrate on singing the blues, and particularly the songs associated with Bessie Smith, and in 1952 she formed the Muskrat Ramblers with Al Watt and Derek Martin, singing around the clubs of Belfast by night while working as an art teacher by day.
On holiday in England in 1954, she met the singer Beryl Bryden, who introduced her to Chris Barber. The band leader later recalled that he found her voice “astonishing” and he immediately urged her to join his band. Patterson agreed, but first had to return to Belfast and did not formally join Barber’s group until 1955, by which time she and Barber had become romantically attached. They were married in 1959.
Within a week of joining the band, she made a famous appearance with them at the Festival Hall. Over the next few years, she toured Europe and America with Barber and his musicians and was featured prominently on many of their recordings. She was given the lead role on the EPs Blues (1955), That Patterson Girl (1955), That Patterson Girl Volume 2 (1956) and Ottilie (1959), and on the LP Chris Barber’s Blues Book (1961).
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She also duetted both on stage and on television with Lonnie Donegan, another Barber alumnus, who took American folk-blues songs into the charts during the skiffle craze.
By 1963 Patterson was struggling with a throat problem and her appearances with Barber’s band became fewer. She officially retired from his ensemble in 1973. She released a solo album, 3000 Years With Ottilie, in 1969 (subsequently reissued as Spring Song), which included settings of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
She came out of retirement to appear with Barber in a series of London concerts in 1983, the highlights of which were released the following year on the LP Madame Blues and Doctor Jazz. It was to be her final recording and shortly afterwards she retired to the Scottish seaside town of Ayr, where she lived for the remainder of her life.
She is survived by her former husband, Chris Barber.
Ottilie Patterson, singer, was born on January 31, 1932. She died on June 20, 2011, aged 79