Burton was also a recording artist and is most known as the lead voice on the Whyte Boots’ “Nightmare,” one of the most accurate approximations of the Shangri-Las ever recorded. She was also a very credible blue-eyed pop-soul singer, though, with a low and sometimes raunchy voice. She began recording as a solo act for Roulette in the mid-’60s and in 1967, issued a hard-to-find album, Breakout, on Mercury. That LP was impressive, well-produced pop-soul with New York’s sophisticated brand of pop-rock production, and it is unfortunate that Burton did not have the chance to develop further as a recording act in her own right. Burton and her husband, recording engineer Roy Cicala, began writing and producing together in the late ’60s. Cicala became a top engineer in the industry and owner of the Record Plant (East) Studios in New York City, working on several John Lennon albums. Burton sang backup vocals on Lennon’s “#9 Dream” in the mid-’70s, and recorded some tracks around that time that Lennon helped produce with Cicala. A couple of these numbers, which are poor disco-style tunes, appear on the CD packaged with Kristofer Engelhardt’s book -Beatles Undercover, which documents the Beatles’ appearances on records by other artists.
