Patty Blee

by Alex HendersonBorn and raised in Brigantine, NJ, East Coast resident Patty Blee is an acoustic guitar-playing singer/songwriter whose influences range from Bonnie Raitt to Melissa Etheridge, Sheryl Crow, and Lucinda Williams. Blee's earthy roots rock and pop/rock aren't country or folk, per se, but there are country and folk influences in her writing and she has cited country-pop favorite Emmylou Harris and folk-pop icon Joni Mitchell as early inspirations. Growing up in Brigantine (which is on the southern New Jersey Shore near Atlantic City), Blee started listening to, as she puts it, "acoustic-based singer/songwriters," at an early age. In addition to some of the abovementioned female artists, Blee was a big fan of male folk-rock favorites like Jackson Browne and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. In the '90s, Blee became an admirer of Crow, Patty Griffin, and Shawn Colvin (although she has a grittier, more rugged approach than Colvin and doesn't get into the type of girlish, waif-like singing that Jewel and Suzanne Vega are known for). Performing along the South Jersey Shore in the '90s and early 2000s, Blee performed covers as well as original material; in some Jersey Shore clubs, covers are obligatory (or, at the very least, greatly encouraged). But she exclusively performs original material on her debut album, Disguise, which came out on the Somers Point, NJ-based Treasure label in 2002.