Patric Petrie: Irish Seanchaí, Magic Pixie, and Survivor

Beautiful Patric Petrie. Photo by Cathryn Beeks.

A traditional Irish storyteller is known as a seanchaí. Verbal efficiency is not their goal. Rather, the Irish consider it the highest form of conversation to sit down with a seanchaí (preferably in a cozy pub over a Guinness, while looking out over the screen-saver hills) and listen as they meander around six to eight topics, filling each with rich, tangential details. And just when you think they’ve hopelessly strayed from any identifiable point, they wrap it back around to the original topic or theme.

I’m talking to Patric Petrie over Zoom. It’s 10am. There’s no Guinness. And Patric—a fiddle prodigy, journalist, and mother—is too busy to indulge in all the side topics her Irish forebears might have. But her conversational style, her music, her career, her life—all still carry the unmistakable signs of a seanchaí.

First up, there’s her paranormal power of being, as she puts it, “totally key blind.” I’ve personally witnessed this at song circles. While average mortals start by asking what key a song is in, such trite information is of no use to Patric. Just start playing and after the first four (at most eight) notes, she’s off and running. As she puts it, sometimes she just looks over and notices that “my hand is playing and I’m not in control. It’s like somebody else is in charge.” Bandmate Cathryn Beeks credits this as one of the reasons they call Patric their pixie—both because of her petite stature and because “she’s magic.”

When I ask if she’s always been key blind or if this comes from a lifetime of practice, she can’t really say. But she recounts how she memorized the music from Mary Poppins after seeing it once at age six, so I suspect it’s the former. She studied classical music until the strict discipline of it all drove her away, a decision that almost caused her symphony-loving father to disown her.

Instead, she found international success with more lucrative benefactors: companies like Disney and Microsoft. Sometimes this meant providing background ambiance at corporate gigs—what she calls “musical wallpaper.” But sometimes it meant being the featured band in Tokyo, where devoted fans would line up for hours to see her Irish band play four shows a night. Patric herself even developed a cult-like following of Japanese fans who’d show up in long red wigs to match her signature locks and dance at her shows. Such devotion isn’t surprising given that, as acclaimed local drummer and bandmate Jules Stewart puts it, “she’s always got the audience wrapped around her tiny little finger.”

Patric with her music partner Tim Foley.

But a fan base of red-haired Japanese dancers didn’t come easy. When Patric started, the common belief was that “if you’re a woman and you’re playing, you must be somebody’s sister or girlfriend.” Women were singers but rarely musicians; she remembers staying home to watch the premiere of MTV because “it was the first time I saw women playing instruments.” Sometimes she’ll still pinch herself when she realizes, “I’m playing at the same level and being treated the same way as the guys. That doesn’t sound like much to someone who’s 20 right now. But when you’re my age, 68, there’s a lifetime of that.”

On top of battling gender barriers, Patric spent many years juggling single motherhood, a day job as a business journalist, playing gigs, and giving lessons. This is the point when many people would have shifted priorities and put the fiddle in the closet for a decade or two. But that wasn’t an option. She admits a small nugget that feels refreshing but a little scandalous—while some women think of themselves as mothers first, “music is really how I identify myself more than anything else.” That doesn’t mean neglecting your children—it just means that when you bring your newborn sons home from the hospital, you “have a big jam session, sit them on your lap, and play music over them.”

Over time, she found her people and expanded her repertoire. She co-founded the group Skelpin—a supergroup that would go on to receive six San Diego Music Award nominations and one win in the World Music category. Skelpin combined Patric’s fiddle with the accordion of Matt Hensley (of Flogging Molly fame) and the bagpipes of Tim Foley to create a unique fusion of Irish music and Spanish flamenco (or as her dad would call it, “flamingo”). Various iterations of this lineup also played on Patric’s SDMA-nominated solo album, Pocket Venus, as well as Flogging Molly cruises in the Bahamas. More recently, you can catch her playing in local venues with Craig Fisher from Farm Truck and the all-women group Calamity. Bandmate Marcia Clare describes the recurring theme of Patric’s success: “she’s always in complete command of the audience”—a pixie who’s “100-feet tall up there on that stage.”

But command of an audience doesn’t always translate to command of one’s life offstage. Though Patric successfully battled her first round of breast cancer, that cancer returned. She lost one of her two sons in tragic circumstances. In her darkest days, music and friends were the only things keeping her going. “My best friend Lauren would show up at my house on a Saturday morning and smack me around and say, ‘go put on makeup, I’m not leaving without you.’ It was that and the guys in the band and Calamity—knowing that they have my back, and they still have my back.”

Patric’s band, Skelpin.

And the Irish know a thing or two about surviving troubles. I comment that the last several times I’ve seen her and asked how she’s doing, her response has been, “never better.” As she puts it, “It’s never going to be better than it is today. I’m in a really good place. I know that. I’ve got three cats, I’ve got one son left, and they bring so much joy to my life. Everybody’s going to end up with something. I’m just lucky that I get it earlier than everybody else and get to look good at it, too. And if it doesn’t work out, I’ll be directing the choir when you all show up late for practice.”

In the meantime, she won’t let a few pesky cells keep her from dreaming. “I’ve gone around the world, and what I would love to do is more of the same. I love going someplace where I’m not familiar with the people, with the music, with the culture, and seeing how I fit in. I want to go to a small island in Greece and sit there with a bunch of grody old guys, drinking what they’re drinking and smoking what they’re smoking and playing Greek music. And I want to do the same in Spain, in the backwoods of Bulgaria, Norway, Iceland. This is my dream. There are just so many different places that I want to go settle in for a couple of months, play music until I feel like, ‘that’s a good fit.’ And then move on and do it someplace else.”

Patric with Marcia Claire & Cathryn Beeks.

But before she moves on, there’s a show to play. It’s called Appreciating Patric: Violin, Fiddle, and Friends, sponsored by San Diego Folk Heritage and Listen Local, which will feature some of her most cherished collaborators: Tim Foley, Matt Hensley, and Brad Spitz. Calamity will join, Skelpin will reunite, and Patric will even do some singing. As she describes it, “that’s why this show is special, because I get to play with all my best friends.”

Well, that’s about seven topics—right in the sweet spot. And sure enough, before we sign off, she wraps back around to Mary Poppins and those Japanese fans in red wigs. And whether you see her as a seanchaí, musician, friend, performer, mother, or magic pixie, Patric is—as one friend described her—pure love.

San Diego Folk Heritage has planned a celebration in honor of Patric Petrie on Friday, November 14 at Templar’s Hall, Old Poway Park, 14134 Midland Dr., Poway.