For much of the 1960s, a real highlight for blues fans was provided by the touring American Folk Blues Festivals which played concert halls through UK and Europe and were organised by the Frankfurt-based Lippmann and Rau. These shows introduced the emerging, largely student, blues audience to the fascinating names that we had only previously known through often obscure recordings as well as musicians and singers we hadn’t even heard of.
The AFBF of 1967 boasted a mouth-watering bill with Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Little Walter, Bukka White, Son House, Skip James, Hound Dog Taylor, Dillard Crume, Odie Payne and the singer who was to be, for many of us, the outstanding performer of that tour, Koko Taylor.
Offstage she was gentle, modest and charming with the most radiant of smiles, but onstage, taking care of business, she really was something else. The first time I heard that huge roar of a voice was both shocking and wonderful; before or since I have never heard such a voice. Think back to when you first heard Ray Charles, it was that sort of feeling.
We are all familiar with those big-voiced early blues legends Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Big Mama Thornton and Memphis Minnie, but in my book not one of them had the sheer, almost primitive power and feeling of Koko Taylor. I still don’t quite understand why she is not acknowledged as the most important woman blues singer of the post-war era.
At the time of that tour, Koko was riding high on the success of her hit single of the previous year, “Wang Dang Doodle”, which featured a young Buddy Guy on a Willie Dixon song that Howlin’ Wolf had recorded five years earlier.
Koko’s 1966 release, the last ever hit for Chess Records, made #4 on the Rhythm & Blues chart and #58 on the pop chart and sold over million records.
Koko was born Cora Anna Walton in 1928, the daughter of a sharecropper on a farm in Bartlett, near Memphis. Her mother died when Cora was eleven and she and her five siblings grew up helping their father in the field. “I didn’t get a chance to go to school a lot,” she said. “What I know, I taught myself.”
Nicknamed Koko by her Mother because of her love for hot chocolate, she fell in love with music at an early age, singing Gospel in a local Baptist church. Koko, her brothers and sisters were inspired by gospel and the music they heard played on WDIA, by disc jockeys who included B.B. King and Rufus Thomas. “Gospel on Sunday, the Blues on Monday,” she said, “that’s the way I was raised up.”
Weekdays they would sing and play together while they picked and chopped cotton and in the evenings they would sing their own blues and accompany themselves on home-made instruments.
“The first blues record I ever heard was ‘Me and My Memphis Blues’ by Memphis Minnie on B. B. King’s radio show, I was 12 or 13 and just loved it.”
Still in her teens she met Robert ‘Pops’ Taylor. He drove a truck delivering cotton, “Sometimes I would go in his truck to make extra money picking cotton,” she said. “He would buy me bologna sandwiches. The next thing I know, I ended up being his girlfriend.” They married and in 1952, she and her husband decided to move to Chicago, with Koko having no thoughts about becoming a singer, arriving, in Koko’s words, with “thirty-five cents and a box of Ritz Crackers. For me going to Chicago was like going to heaven.”
Pops worked initially in a slaughterhouse, later in a packing company while Koko worked cleaning folk’s houses in Chicago’s wealthy northern suburbs. Settling in on the South Side, they would often play the blues together in the evenings, and on Saturdays frequent the South Side’s bustling blues clubs where Pops would encourage Koko to get up and sing with the band, which on occasion would include Muddy, Buddy Guy or J.B. Lenoir.
And that’s where, in 1962, Willie Dixon heard her, told Koko that he “had never heard a woman sing the blues like that” and arranged a recording session with the small USA Records where she recorded the 1963 single “Honky Tonk” with J.B. Lenoir. This was followed by a cut on the 1964 Spivey Records album “Chicago Blues” and the next year, Dixon signed her to Chess Records. The 1966 release of “Wang Dang Doodle” enabled both her and Pops to give up their day jobs with Pops taking on the role of her manager.
It was the dawn of an illustrious career that by the early 70s saw her performing at Carnegie Hall and major festivals worldwide including Montreux and Ann Arbour where she recorded a live album for Atlantic. She took her own band, The Blues Machine, on the road and recorded two albums for Chess.
In 1970 she appeared in the film “The Blues Is Alive and Well in Chicago” and was later to be seen in “Mercury Rising” [1988], “Wild At Heart” [1990] and “Blues Brothers 2000”.
Leonard Chess had died in 1969, and by the early 70s the mighty Chess Records were encountering financial problems, going under in 1975. Koko Taylor signed to the young Chicago-based Alligator Records, run by the indefatigable Bruce Iglauer and released the Grammy-nominated “I Got What It Takes” in 1975, the first of nine albums for Alligator, eight of which were nominated for Grammies which were to sit alongside her twenty-nine W.C. Handy Awards.
It was the dawn of an illustrious career that by the early 70s saw her performing at Carnegie Hall and major festivals worldwide including Montreux and Ann Arbour where she recorded a live album for Atlantic. She took her own band, The Blues Machine, on the road and recorded two albums for Chess.
In 1970 she appeared in the film “The Blues Is Alive and Well in Chicago” and was later to be seen in “Mercury Rising” [1988], “Wild At Heart” [1990] and “Blues Brothers 2000”.
Leonard Chess had died in 1969, and by the early 70s the mighty Chess Records were encountering financial problems, going under in 1975. Koko Taylor signed to the young Chicago-based Alligator Records, run by the indefatigable Bruce Iglauer and released the Grammy-nominated “I Got What It Takes” in 1975, the first of nine albums for Alligator, eight of which were nominated for Grammies which were to sit alongside her twenty-nine W.C. Handy Awards.
The Alligator marketing campaign targeted the emerging, mainly white student audience which served Koko well, the college campus circuit proving fertile touring ground for the blues, coinciding with the decline of interest in the traditional black blues audiences, where the emerging Soul music gradually eroded the popularity of the blues.
In 1988 tragedy struck, when their tour van was involved in a near-fatal accident, leaving Koko with a fractured shoulder and collarbone and several broken ribs. That wasn’t all. Her husband, manager and constant companion for 37 years, went into cardiac arrest and never recovered. He passed away a few months later.
Remarkably, Koko Taylor made a comeback in 1990, continued to tour extensively, and in 1994 featured at the Chicago Blues Festival where she was honoured by the Chicago City Mayor before her entire performance was broadcast live on WBEL.FM. However, that year did mark the beginning of a seven year break from recording.
Koko Taylor opened her own blues club in 1994 on Division Street in Chicago, relocating six years later to Wabash Avenue in Chicago’s South Loop. In 2000 she returned with the album “Royal Blues” on Alligator that also featured B.B.King, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Keb Mo’ and Johnnie Johnson.
In 1996 she married again, this time to Hays Harris. She was given away by Buddy Guy, the guitarist on that long ago recording, “Wang Dang Doodle”.
Even in her later years she was still performing over 70 shows a year. “I’m about the only woman out there singing the old traditional blues,” she said. “Guys like Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters, this is where I get my inspiration from. This is where I get my courage and my strength. I would think that’s what caused me to be where I am today.”
By now she was living just south of Chicago, in Country Club Hills, Illinois, but gradually health issues began to slow her down until, in 2004, she cut back on touring. Her 2007 album on Alligator, “Old School”, renewed interest in her, but she remained plagued by ill-health.
This remarkable woman played her final show at The Blues Music Awards in Memphis on May 7th 2009 singing “Wang Dang Doodle” following the presentation of her award for “Traditional Blues Female Artist of The year.”
She died a few weeks later in Chicago, on June 3rd 2009, of complications following surgery for gastrointestinal bleeding.
She was 80 years old.
Koko Taylor influenced many blues singers including Bonnie Raitt, Janis Joplin, Susan Tedeschi and Shemekia Copeland. Despite winning many awards, including Traditional Blues Female Artist Award eleven times in the period 1992 to 2009, more than any other artist, male or female.