Marie "Queenie" Lyons

Marie “Queenie” Lyons is a mystery girl, a Southern enigma. Like a kind of black Bobbie Gentry, after just one album (“SOUL FEVER”) Queenie vanished. Following its 1970 release, she disappeared off the soul map forever, like a roman candle floating off into the warm Southern night. Because of the prodigious wealth of talent in black America at the time, great albums with miniscule marketing budgets were often overlooked. “SOUL FEVER” was just a drop in an ocean of fabulous, funky R&B recordings released that year. But over the decades, it’s become a CULT CLASSIC and established as one of the rarest and most prized Southern soul albums from that prolific era. Queenie certainly had the qualifications (in both sass and vocals) to be hired by JAMES BROWN as one of his “funky divas.” But quite what happened to Queenie after the album’s release has been lost in the mists of time. “SOUL FEVER” languished in obscurity for a couple of decades. But slowly, through the years, it’s ascended to cult classic status. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.