Beth Patterson is a Lafayette-born, New Orleans-based multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter who calls herself a musical mongrel. She is foremost a player of the eight- and ten-stringed Irish bouzoukis, adaptations of a traditional Greek instrument, and she dubs her own eclectic mix of original and traditional songs "SWAP" — Songwriter/World/Acoustic/Progressive. Audiences have described her as "a cross between a cobra and a puppy."
Her path was anything but straight: violin as a child, classical oboe, electric bass in Cajun and punk bands, English horn in the Acadiana Symphony, and bass in her mother's Cajun band Renaissance 'Cadienne. She studied music in Ireland, completed her undergraduate degree in music at Loyola University New Orleans, and has made New Orleans her home and base ever since. Her 2009 album On Better Paths was nominated for a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album.
Patterson performs widely as a solo act and with Celtic fiddler Seán Heely's band, with the ZoüKeys duo alongside her husband Josh Paxton, and as a founding member of the Poor Clares. She is also a prolific fiction writer published in numerous anthologies and free-standing novels, and her music has turned up on film soundtracks — her voice on Sinners, choir work on other scores, and an on-screen turn in Spinal Tap II.