During the era of ska music, Jamaica was blessed with a pioneering singer named Millicent ‘Patsy’ Todd, aka Pata-Pata Patsy, who was known for her great voice as well as her trendsetting style and fashion. “Diana Ross had nothing on this poor Western Kingston girl in the 1960s. The fact is .
.. she was Jamaica’s Diana Ross.
She is the one who walked away from music, but she paved the way for many female singers,” her ‘son’ Kareem Ali, the son of Prince Buster, said proudly. On Monday, Patsy Todd will turn 80. However, there is more than a tinge of poignancy about this milestone.
The celebration for the woman who “always keep up her birthday ...
and loved big things ...
big, elaborate furniture, big houses ...
even big pots” will be muted, owing to her dementia. Ali, who is overseeing the well-being of the woman he calls his mother, and her friends Derrick Morgan and Stranger Cole, remembers the singer on the eve of her birthday. Patsy’s career had an inauspicious start.
Her mother saw Derrick Morgan on the road and told him that her daughter could sing. “Patsy and her mother were living on Drummond Street,” veteran ska and rocksteady singer Derrick Morgan told The Sunday Gleaner . “I went to the house and saw Patsy washing her clothes in a pan.
I asked her if she could sing and she said ‘Yeah’. I told her to sing me something. She pitch a nice gospel song to me .
.. .
I don’t remember the name of it now, but she sound good.” That was essentiall.