Queen Esther

Queen Esther

New Release: BLACKBIRDING

“There hasn’t ever been an album quite like Queen Esther’s BLACKBIRDING. It’s an emotional study of events at Gettysburg during the Civil War, and how it turned historial times into an era that never really allowed Blacks to get past the ramifications which occurred then. Queen Esther’s absolute dedication to move into a unique time of American life hits like buckshot. Her voice is suitably strong to what her songs approach, and make the listener believe they are in the time of destruction and pain, and show how the sins of the past have not begun to be healed. The singer has assembled an outfit that approaches modern music from the lens of the distant past, and the vocals are touched by the era of the 1800s, while not sounding dated at all. No other singer has found quite a sound that touches Queen Esther’s. Her way of imparting such darkness feels like it’s coming from something that no one else has been able to share. This is an achievement beyond just history. It also time travels into a place that can make the listener reel into a lost circle of hurt, and not know how they really got there. It will be a performance when played live that feels like it could easily be on Broadway as well as a rock theatre. There really hasn’t been anything to compare to right now. Instead, it offers thrills which could be coming soon. It’s all there.”

-Bill Bentley, Bentley’s Bandstand, Americana Highways

“Can you imagine a black Lucinda Williams? Not like when she plays the blues torn from her first albums, no. A black Lucinda Williams in pop, rhythm, blues, and even gender roots Americana. So it sounds as if you can imagine such a hodgepodge somehow, the latest album from this brutal, original, explosive singer."
-Vanity Fair (Spain)

Raised in the unapologetically Black bastion of Atlanta, Georgia – ensconced in the vibrancy of the Black Arts Movement and the sonic undertow of the Black church – and rooted in Charleston, South Carolina's culturally rich and enigmatic Lowcountry, a region with African traditions and Black folkways that span centuries and deeply inform her work, Queen Esther embraces lost American history along with her wide-ranging and ever-changing aural influences, as she leans heavily on the bluing of the note to create reclamation-driven Black Americana. Her Southern penchant for storytelling intertwines historical truths with personal anecdotes, contemporising traditional and original songs and blurring the past and present while embracing the connectedness of the human spirit. Queen Esther recently released Blackbirding, a reclamation-driven Black country soul album that roams the Gettysburg battlefield to create songs that dismantle myths and assumptions about what happened there and how this unending war still affects us today.

ABOUT THE ALBUM: In 2020, on the verge of the pandemic lockdown, a month-long all-media artist residency at Gettysburg National Military Park, located in a house on the battlefield, allowed Queen Esther to create art in any direction. The result? A performance art piece that was given a staged reading Off-Broadway in 2024, thanks to a playwriting residency at WP Theater Pipeline PlayLAB, a mini-documentary by filmmaker Elmo King, and this album – all bearing the same name.  Blackbirding is the 19th-century practice of kidnapping free Black folk and selling them into slavery.  The album was recorded at Mighty Toad Recording Studio with engineer/owner Craig Dreyer and released on her imprint EL Recordings. Blackbirding is more than an album—it's an act of truth-telling.

Created during an artist residency on the Gettysburg battlefield, this project reclaims the Civil War narrative through the lens of a Southern Black feminist, bridging past and present with unflinching honesty. The album Blackbirding explores why, like the Civil War and slavery, blackbirding has never really ended. This album centers on Queen Esther’s Black feminist perspective, encompassing different aspects of the conflict while acknowledging what has remained and how it continues to define us as a nation. She churns lost history into music that epitomizes her Black Americana sound: a seamless blend of country, jazz, soul, R&B, and pop. Not surprisingly, this reflects the unbridled chaotic mélange of the battlefield – Northerners and Southerners, Irish immigrants, Huguenots and Europeans of every ilk, trained by the French military, fought over the states’ rights to own slaves on farmland owned by free Black folk, and drowning in blood and wine. Did the ghosts on the battlefield follow her into this soundscape? If you listen closely, you can hear all of this and feel their presence – and so much more. Each song addresses aspects of the battlefield and the war, as well as the present. 

Queen Esther toured internationally and recorded with her mentor, harmolodic guitarist James "Blood" Ulmer, for many years in several incarnations, including a stint as frontwoman in his seminal band Odyssey. A bandleader in her own right, she has performed and/or recorded with Speedball Baby, Mona's Hot Five, Eyal Vilner Big Band, Burnt Sugar Arkestra, Michael Arenella and his Dreamland Orchestra, Richard Barone (The Bongos), Elliot Sharp (as the alt-blues duo Hoosegow), Swingadelic, LaLa Brooks (The Crystals), Dusty Wright, The Hot Toddies, Dan Levinson's Jass Band, and The Dirtbombs, amongst others.

Recent highlights include performances with The Black Opry Revue; her western swing project, The Black Rose of Texas with Cindy Cashdollar (featuring vocalists Queen Esther, Kat Edmonson, and Synead Cidney Nichols) at Lincoln Center's outdoor festival Summer for the City along with a sold-out weekend at Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola; one of 25 chosen for the 2023 Western Arts Alliance Performance Artist Discovery Program; one of three Americans chosen for 2022 Global Music Match; one of five playwrights chosen for the 2022 - 2024 WP Theater "Pipeline" PlayLAB Playwriting Residency; and official showcases with Folk Alliance International (2023) and Americanafest (2021).

Other releases from Queen Esther include “Things Are Looking Up,” released in 2024. She also released Rona (2023). Her Black Americana album, Gild The Black Lily (EL Recordings, 2021), continues to make waves internationally, as does her 2018 TED Talk on the true origins of bluegrass and country music.

Queen Esther Links:

Website: https://queen-esther.com

Facebook: https://facebook.com/1queenesther

Instagram:  https://instagram.com/thisisqueenesther

YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/user/queenesther

Queen Esther: The true origins of country music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltswXrGK4DQ

Press Quotes: 

"Queen Esther is a Billie Holliday-ish singer. Her singing also somehow reminds me of Sly Stone in the way she slides a syllable from one note to another in her melodies while imbuing the note with funk and the word with poignance."-- Rate Your Music

"Every song is sung with passion and fire by this underrated female singer who should be a musical giant." --Country Music People (UK)

“Our admiration for Queen Esther is almost beyond measure.” -- Rootstime (Belgium)

It’s the melancholy country cuts that Queen Esther excels in. --Americana UK

Queen Esther ties the loose strands of black and white churches, juke joints and honky-tonks, blue notes and twang into knots too tangled to be untied. She reminds us that each half of the phrase, Afro-Americana, helps the other. -- Geoffrey Himes, Paste

Queen Esther's vocals, even at their hardest rocking, invoke the high-and-lonesome plaintiveness of the honky-tonk/bluegrass/rockabilly continuum as much as they do the harsher timbered blues tradition. --Living Blues

A masterpiece of an extremely talented singer and songwriter who can compete with the major players in this field, such as Lucinda Williams. --Blues Magazine (The Netherlands)