Roosevelt Sykes (January 31, 1906 – July 17, 1983) was an American blues musician, also known as “the Honeydripper“.

Sykes was born the son of a musician in Elmar, Arkansas. “Just a little old sawmill town”, Sykes said of his birthplace. The Sykes family was living in St. Louis by 1909. Sykes often visited his grandfather’s farm near West Helena. He began playing the church organ around the age of ten. “Every summer I would go down to Helena to visit my grandfather on his farm,” he told biographer Valerie Wilmer. “He was a preacher and he had an organ I used to practice on, trying to learn how to play. I always liked the sound of the blues, liked to hear people singing, and since I was singing first, I was trying to play like I sang.” Sykes was baptized at 13 years old, his lifelong beliefs never conflicting with playing the blues.

At age 15, he went on the road playing piano in a barrelhouse style of blues. Like many bluesmen of his time, he traveled around playing to all-male audiences in sawmill, turpentine and levee camps along the Mississippi River, sometimes in a duo with Big Joe Williams, gathering a repertoire of raw, sexually explicit material. In 1925 Sykes met Leothus “Lee” Green, a piano player in a West Helena theater playing a mix of blues, ragtime, waltz, and jazz to accompany silent movies. They worked the Louisiana and Mississippi work camp and roadhouse circuit together, with the older man acting as mentor and protector to Sykes. “I just been pickin’ a little cotton,” Sykes would say from the stage, “and pickin’ a little piano.” The more experienced Green taught him the style, characterized by separate bass and treble rhythms, that would become the basis for “44 Blues“. Sykes’ wanderings eventually brought him back to St. Louis, Missouri, where he met St. Louis Jimmy Oden, the writer of the blues standard “Goin’ Down Slow“.