Jerold Don Ottley was the music director of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir from 1974 to 1999. His duties with the choir included the preparation and performance of nearly thirteen hundred weekly radio and television broadcasts of Music and the Spoken Word. He also led the choir in more than thirty commercial recordings and more than twenty major tours, in addition to regular concerts in the choir's home in the Salt Lake City tabernacle.

Early in his career, Dr. Ottley was a teacher and conductor in the schools and churches of Salt Lake City. Just prior to his appointment with the Tabernacle Choir, he taught on the music faculty at the University of Utah and served as the assistant chair of the music department. Since his retirement, he has been involved in volunteer work for four years as administrator and teacher for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir Training School at Temple Square, as a Tabernacle Choir staff volunteer revising the choral library computer database, as artistic advisor to the Salt Lake Interfaith Roundtable, and as a lay bishop for a congregation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. From 2005 to 2008, he directed the University Chorale at Brigham Young University-Hawaii, a LDS church-owned university in the town of Laie on Oahu's north shore.

Jerold Ottley is married to soprano JoAnn Ottley, with whom he has two grown children.