Remembering Patti Page

CLAREMORE — Grammy award winner, musical icon, and Claremore native Patti Page has passed away in Encinitas, Calif. at the age of 85.According to Claremore Convention and Visitor’s Bureau director Tanya Andrews, Page died in her sleep on New Year’s Day.

“A colleague of mine contacted me about her passing in her sleep on New Year’s Day,” Andrews said. “We know she’d been having some health issues for a while — the same which prevented her from coming to Claremore last year when we premiered ‘Flipside’, the musical story of her life, here in Claremore. We’re all saddened to hear of her passing.”

Page, born Clara Ann Fowler, is originally from Claremore and rose to become one of the country’s best known female artists in the late 1940s and 1950s with songs such as “Tennesse Waltz,” “I Went to Your Wedding,” and “(How Much is That) Doggie in the Window.” 

When rock and roll music became popular during the second half of the 1950s, traditional pop music was becoming less popular, but Page was one of few traditional pop music singers who was able to sustain her success.

She continuing to have major hits into the mid-1960s with “Old Cape Cod”, “Allegheny Moon”, “A Poor Man’s Roses (Or a Rich Man’s Gold)”, and “Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte”.

In 1997, Patti Page was inducted into the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame.