She is renowned for her passionate stage performances, wide vocal range and distinctive high-octave belting. Her biography, Don't Block the Blessings, remained at the top of The New York Times best-seller list for several weeks. LaBelle has been called the Godmother of Soul, the High Priestess of Good Vibrations and the Queen Of Rock & Soul.
LaBelle was born Patricia Louise Holt in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Henry Holt, a railroad worker, and Bertha Robinson Holt, a housewife. The third of four sisters, Holt began singing at church at an earlier age. Though Holt enjoyed a happy childhood, she would later recount in her autobiography that she was sexually molested as a child. When Holt was twelve, her parents split up. Holt attended John Bartram High School in Philadelphia. During an audition for a school play, a teacher advised Holte to form a singing group.
Holt, who was nicknamed "Patsy" by friends and family, formed her first girl group called the Ordettes in 1958.
In 1959, when two of the original Ordettes left, Holt and fellow Ordette Sundray Tucker brought in singers Nona Hendryx and Sarah Dash, from a recently defunct rival group, the Del Capris. When Tucker's family made Sandra leave the group, she was replaced by hometown friend Cindy Birdsong. With her mother's blessings, Patti left high school to tour with the Ordettes. The group was managed by Bernard Montague and toured from local nightclubs to honky tonks and truck stops in the Philadelphia area.
During an audition with Newtown Records, the Ordettes almost didn't get a recording contract because Holt, who was the lead singer was considered "too plain, too dark and unattractive" until she sang for him.
Afterwards, he suggested a name change for Holt. Add to the irony after his initial disappointment of Holt, the surname La Belle was French for "the beautiful one". Signing them in 1961, the boss also changed the name of the group to The Blue Belles, named initially after a Newtown subsidiary (Blue Belle Records), which later led to threats of a lawsuit over another girl group's manager. The name was altered to Patti La Belle and Her Blue Belles in 1963 and changed slightly to Patti LaBelle and The Bluebelles two years later.
LaBelle didn't start to experience commercial solo success until 1983 when she released her first charted hit album, I'm in Love Again, which featured LaBelle's first #1 R&B and top fifty pop hit with "If Only You Knew" and its top ten R&B follow-up, "Love, Need and Want You". The album became her first solo release to be certified gold. In 1984, LaBelle recorded the songs "New Attitude" and "Stir It Up" for the Beverly Hills Cop soundtrack. Both songs became mainstays on pop radio with "New Attitude" reaching the pop top 20. During this period, LaBelle began dressing as flamboyantly as she did during the Labelle days in an effort to carve out an original persona. LaBelle's appearances on Motown Returns to the Apollo and the Live Aid concerts of 1985 introduced her to a new audience. That same year, LaBelle was granted her first television special, which became highly rated, featuring Cyndi Lauper, Bill Cosby and Luther Vandross. LaBelle's popularity increased further in 1986 with the release of her best-selling album to date, Winner in You. The album yielded her first solo #1, "On My Own" with pop balladeer Michael McDonald, the Top 40 Billboard Hot 100 hit, "Oh, People", the moderate R&B chart hit, "Kiss Away The Pain" and the Hot Dance Music/Club Play chart hit, "Something Special Is Gonna Happen Tonight."
LaBelle scored a moderate R&B and pop chart hit with the Diane Warren ballad, "If You Asked Me To", in 1989. The song peaked at #10 on the Adult Contemporary and R&B charts. It was later covered by Céline Dion in 1992, with striking similarity in arrangement, key and vocal styling. Dion's version peaked at #1 on both the Pop & A/C charts. In an interview with the online magazine Monaco Revue Patti claimed racism in the music industry was responsible for the difference in record sales, and revealed that accepting this was the most difficult obstacle she had to face in her career. Featured off LaBelle's album, Be Yourself, the album spawned a top ten single with the Prince-produced "Yo Mister".
In 1991, LaBelle released the gold-selling Burnin' album, which helped her win her first Grammy Award -- tying with vocalist Lisa Fischer for Best R&B Female Vocal Performance. Burnin' featured the top five R&B hits "Somebody Loves You Baby (You Know Who It Is)", "When You've Been Blessed (Feels Like Heaven)" and "Feels Like Another One". This album is also notable because it includes the first Labelle reunion recording with Sarah Dash and Nona Hendryx, singing on "Release Yourself". The trio reunited again as Labelle in 1995 for the recording of the dance song, "Turn It Out", which hit number-one on the dance singles chart. Success continued with subsequent albums like 1994's Gems (featuring the hit "The Right Kinda Lover"), 1997's Flame (featuring the hit "When You Talk About Love"), and 1998's Live One Night Only winning LaBelle her a second Grammy (this time, without tying).
During this period, LaBelle had a recurring role as Adele Wayne (mother of Dwayne Wayne) in the NBC sitcom A Different World and also starred in her own sitcom, Out All Night playing a club owner and former R&B star named Chelsea Paige, which debuted in 1992 and canceled in 1993 after 19 episodes. In January 1995, La Belle performed at the Super Bowl XXIX halftime show, with Tony Bennett, Arturo Sandoval and the Miami Sound Machine, in a program entitled "Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Forbidden Eye", to promote the upcoming Disney theme park attraction. She also recorded a theme song for The Oprah Winfrey Show entitled "Get with the Program," which was used from 1996 to 1998 and led to the phrase "get with the program" becoming a catch phrase in pop culture.
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