Lady Dottie Sings the Blues

Dorothy Mae Whitsett has been singing the blues for six decades. San Diego just might be her band’s stairstep to stardom.

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THE SCENE IS LIKE something out of a Hollywood movie—or a bad dream. On a pitch-black night, in the middle of one of the busiest freeways in the world, a madman dodges cars, taunting them in the fashion of a matador. Four lanes away, a pneumatic black woman in a roadside van dazedly repeats a single line: “Oh my God. Oh my God,” as if it’s a litany, as if He might be listening. The driver of the van, with the confident good looks and unflappable demeanor of James Dean, shakes his head and closes his eyes, imagining what a human head is going to look like spread across 20 yards of asphalt.

Outside, two distorted figures dance in the headlights. They laugh and jeer drunkenly, provoking the matador further into the maniacal hijinks.

“Shit!” Dorothy Mae Whitsett exclaims, looking back on the lunacy. (She speaks in African-American English vernacular with a hint of Southern accent, and the word comes out in two syllables.) “I thought he a goner, sure. Crazy motherf---er shoulda died. I mean, God can’t be lookin’ out for every dumbass in the world—He got more important things to be doin’.”

The 64-year old Whitsett talks like who she is—one of the country’s greatest (albeit unheralded) living divas—and the near-death encounter on the 405 freeway was but another absurd blip in a music career that’s spanned six decades. Known as Lady Dottie to a legion of adoring San Diego fans, the blues-belting Whitsett is a throwback to a time and place America has largely repressed. She grew up drinking out of colored-only fountains and picking cotton in the torrid sun of Talladega, Alabama. Now, the better part of a lifetime later, she calls it like she sees it. The stories tumbling out of her mouth are blunt, uncensored, sometimes bleak and never sugarcoated.

Nor are they without a sense of hope and redemption.

This is a woman who, until she was 19, spent seven days a week at the Church of God and Christ, an ardent believer who has no doubt He’s waiting for her with a smile and a seat at the front of the choir. A woman whose father worked three jobs and carried his kids to the picking fields in the family’s only source of transportation—a mule and buggy. A woman who quit school after the eighth grade to raise her 12 brothers and sisters and then, at 16, was carried off to the chicken factory by her mother, where she waited an entire year—eight hours a day—to land a spot in the rotation.

A woman who escaped it all while she was still a teenager.

Whitsett answered a call in the paper for a “colored nanny,” somewhere near New York City, to help raise a white woman’s kids. A year later, with that contract fulfilled, she morphed into a raspy-voiced gospel and blues singer and slid into the role of Miss Dynamite. Four decades of arduous, underpaid and sometimes-bizarre journeyman work in the music industry followed. From New Jersey and Harlem to Atlanta and later the Fro Brigham Preservation Band in San Diego, with countless acts in between, Whitsett has endured bad pay and lack of appreciation . . . and she’s loved every minute of it.

Constant blue-collar work has been her lifelong companion (from dishwashing to housecleaning), along with a deeply seated faith. It’s the faith that’s carried her through the vicissitudes, and her unquestioning sense that everything is happening for a reason that makes her current incarnation—as part of one of the most popular yet least likely acts in town—seem as natural as flies on sweet-potato pie. For the first time in her life, she’s backed by four white men, and the act has caught fire: multiple first-place nods at the San Diego Music Awards, steady gigs at several clubs in town and recent stands at the San Diego House of Blues and the Viper Room in Los Angeles.

But as with everything in the music biz, Lady Dottie & the Diamonds has a shelf life. So can the band capitalize on its current wave of success—and establish a following outside of San Diego—before it implodes or saturates the local market? The Diamonds, four of the most accomplished musicians in the town’s music scene, say they’re hell bent on two things: making life as comfortable as possible for their diva and making the transition to the national scene before they overstay their local welcome.

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