The singer who wanted to be like Patti Page: “She adores you”
“I was a kid from Oklahoma who never wanted to be a singer, but was told I could sing. And things snowballed,” Patti Page once said, explaining how her love for country came from a desire to get up and sing whatever tugged at her heart.
One of the most fascinating things about Page’s legacy is that one of the things she’s said to have innovated initially came about entirely by accident. In 1947, when she overdubbed her voice on ‘Confess’, she unintentionally established a new approach and set a new standard, encouraging countless others to try doing the same to make their music sound more rounded and appealing.
However, she only did this at first because of a lack of budget to afford any backing singers, and she instead used her own voice to bulk out the track, singing over herself as if she were her own band. It’s something that’s still done massively across the industry today, and yet, few actually realise Page was the first to do so, changing the way musicians record forever. It also sounds gorgeous, showing that Page could effectively sing with herself and create a narrative based on varying perspectives.
That said, it was actually ‘The Tennessee Waltz’ that cemented her legacy a few years later, again doing the one thing that’s still nearly impossible to pull off successfully in today’s world—covering in a song in a way that’s not only better than the original but makes a hit out of it. She also embedded herself so deeply in culture that it came back some years later, officially becoming the song of Tennessee in the mid-1960s and one that came to symbolise local pride and patriotism in all its simplicity.
Page was the best-selling female musician of the 1950s, taking to country music like it was very much her own thing, and reinventing what the genre meant, combining nostalgia and innovation in ways artists still try to replicate today. She’s one of those whose name few remember, but whose influence can be detected in the many sounds pouring out of the speakers, like an invisible presence or unsung hero that feels as fleeting as mythological.
Maybe it’s because she became massively overshadowed by her male counterparts, but countless of her female contemporaries and descendants saw her as a guiding light, or the ultimate figure of musical brilliance, and the blueprint for what it meant to take the sounds of old and turn them into something new that would completely withstand the test of time. One such name was none other than Patsy Cline.
During an interview in 2003 with Goldmine, Page shared how singers like Anne Murray reflect her influence, and how Patsy Cline told her husband how much she wished she were exactly like Page. “Anne Murray does [reflect my influence],” she said, “she says it, too. Patsy Cline’s husband, when I met him in Nashville, he said, ‘I just wish Patsy could have met you because she just adored you and listened to you all the time and wanted to be like you’.”
Cline wasn’t the only one who wanted to replicate Page’s charm. While she did so with recordings of songs like ‘A Poor Man’s Roses’, other singers, like Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters, brought country sensibilities into their own music because of her, while also discovering a newfound confidence that didn’t always play by the rules. In her, they found a bravery that inspired them to think outside of the box, which is arguably far more influential than anything anyone else did during her era.
