Queen Sylvia Burton

Sylvia Lee Burton was born on June 14, 1941, in Wabbaseka, Arkansas, a small Delta community just outside Pine Bluff. As a girl she taught herself piano, encouraged by a grandmother who was devoted to gospel music and had little patience for anything else. Burton sang in her church choir and later joined The Southern Echoes, a gospel group, carrying that grounding in gospel vocal tradition with her for the rest of her career, even after the music around her changed.

At 19, she left Arkansas for Memphis, hoping to build a career as a singer. It didn't happen the way she planned. She married, started a family, and set performing aside. When that marriage ended in the early 1960s, she relocated to Chicago and began working with the clubs on the South Side, the same circuit that shaped so much of postwar blues.

In Chicago, Burton met guitarist Johnny Embry. They married, and at her request, he taught her to play electric bass, an instrument almost no woman in Chicago blues played at the time. She has been documented by blues historians and record labels alike as one of only a handful of professional-caliber female instrumentalists on the scene, and the only one playing bass. She joined guitarist Lefty Dizz and his band Shock Treatment, holding down the Blue Monday house band slot at the legendary Checkerboard Lounge for more than three years. Her voice, rooted in gospel but shaped by years in blues clubs, became one of the most requested parts of the show.

At 39, with her children grown, Burton stepped out from behind other bandleaders and recorded her own material for Alligator Records' Living Chicago Blues series in 1980, then began fronting her own band across Chicago's South and North Side club circuits. She appeared at Willie Dixon's Delta Blues Festival, performing alongside Sam Myers, Honeyboy Edwards, and Robert Jr. Lockwood, whose work was later captured in the documentary film Mississippi Delta Blues.

Her reputation grew internationally through a touring partnership with West Side guitarist Jimmy "Fast Fingers" Dawkins. Together they toured Europe in 1982 and 1983 as part of the American Blues Festival, sharing stages and television appearances with Jimmy Rogers, Louisiana Red, and Carey Bell. In 1983, she recorded her solo album, Midnight Baby, released under the name Blues Queen Sylvia, with Dawkins returning the favor by backing her in the studio. She continued touring into the mid-1980s, including a 1986 world tour with The Mississippi All-Stars, again sharing stages with harp player Sam Myers.

Burton's health declined in the late 1980s, and she died of cancer in Chicago on February 28, 1992, at 50 years old, without ever receiving the wider recognition her playing deserved.

For the Arkansas River Delta Blues Trail, Queen Sylvia represents a piece of blues history too often left out of the story of a woman forging her own path, paving the way for others to follow. She worked against the odds of the industry and as a female leader in areas others have not, proving she belonged among her Blues peers.  Her path from a Wabbaseka gospel choir to the Checkerboard Lounge to European festival stages is a Delta story for Arkansas to be proud of and continue to be told for generations to come.