A Fond farewell to a true original

I was surprised so little attention was paid to the death of Ottilie Patterson.

I remember going to see her at Derry Guildhall half a century – Jesus Christ! – ago. She was the singer with The Chris Barber Band, the best-known jazz combo, as we used to say, in Britain or Ireland at the time. She sang in deep-throated black American style, full of passion and lusty strength and lovely clarity. She was from Comber in Co. Down, which bewildered and then beguiled jazz audiences everywhere.
Initially, the North didn’t know quite what to make of her. Jazz? Far from that she was reared.
She’d first encountered jazz and blues at Belfast College of Art, became entranced by Jelly Roll Morton, later to stone Van the Man to his soul.
On holiday in London, she got up in a Soho club. Barber had her singing with his band for the next seven nights, until she went back to the teaching job at Ballymena Tech. Days later, a telegram arrived asking her to join the band full-time – a no-brainer. She made her formal debut the following week at the Royal Festival Hall – a truly astonishing progression.
Over the next ten years, she shared vocals with Lonnie Donegan, duetted with gospel great Sister Rosetta Tharpe, sang with Muddy Waters, Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee. When she performed at the Washington Jazz Festival in 1962, the reaction was so overwhelming Duke Ellington’s arrival on stage was delayed for ten minutes. It’s said someone shouted out from the largely African-American audience, “How you sing like us, girl?”
She made albums on her own, blues classics and songs she’d written herself. She contributed original music to It’s Trad Dad, Dick Lester’s last film before Hard Day’s Night.
The thing is, Ottilie wasn’t just a remarkable jazz and blues singer from Northern Ireland. She was right up there.
But the road was to take a toll on her physical and emotional health. She stopped singing regularly in 1966, returned in the ‘70s for short tours with Barber – to whom she was married from 1969 to 1983 – then, briefly again, in 1991, before retiring for good. She spent her last years in a care home in Ayr in Scotland, where she died on June 20. I remember well the gig at the Guildhall and how proud I felt that she was one of our own.

“My name is Rupimandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” – R. Murdoch, July 12, 2011.
“Fuck off, loser” – the Plain People of England, July 13, 2011.

The GAAA (as opposed to the GAA) has been plunged into crisis following allegations that a number of players have been hiding their sexual orientation. Three players accused of bisexuality have been suspended.
The controversy arose after San Francisco softball team D2 was thrown out of the Gay Softball World Series when officials of the Gay Amateur Athletics Association ruled that five members of the squad were “non-gay”. Each team is allowed two non-gay members – a controversial provision in itself – but D2 had included five bisexuals in their line-up. Three were hauled before a disciplinary panel.
One of the three admitted that he was married (to a woman), another said that he was happy to be described as either gay or heterosexual, a third affirmed that he was bisexual but insisted on his right to inclusion. The chairperson of the panel slapped him down: “This is not the bisexual world series, it is the gay world series.”
Then it all became terribly tangled, as, I’m told, gay scenes sometimes do. A lawyer for one of the Bisexual Three argued that if bisexuals were not regarded as gay, all five of the bis should have been suspended. How had the three-from-five selection been made anyway? At random? Or according to some specific criterion? Which was what?
On the other hand, if bis were acknowledged as gay, all five could have been included in the squad as of right – leaving room for two straights in addition.
The GAAA has set up a committee on “redefining inclusion.”
The suspended players are claiming $75,000 each for emotional distress.

Now that they’ve signed Nuri Sahin and Hamit Alintop to play alongside Sami Khedira, Mezut Ozil, Karim Benzema and Lassana Diarra, is Real Madrid the most Muslim team in Europe?

I hear a lot of spluttering about Enda Kenny. Useless blatherskite he’s turned out to be, runs the refrain. Times you’d nearly want Brian Cowen back. Nearly.
Reminds me of Tacitus’ Histories, a rollicking, epigramatical account of the tumult and drama of 69 AD, the year after Nero offed himself.
Everybody should read Tacitus, wittiest and most acerbic chronicler of them all. I picked up a tattered copy in a Charing Cross Road bookshop last week. I’d never previously read it, in English.
Here he is on the feelings of the plebian multitudes of Rome as Otho and Vitellius contended for the imperial crown: “Were they now to visit the temples and pray for Otho? Or rather for Vitellius? Intercession for either would be equally impious. The only thing of which men were certain was that whichever won would be the worse.”
How true that is, how very true.
And asfor Eamon Gilmore...