Koko Taylor

blues singer; business owner

Personal Information

Born Cora Walton on September 28, 1935, in Memphis, TN; married Robert Taylor (deceased); married Hays Harris, 1996.

Career

Discovered by Willie Dixon, 1962; signed with Chess Records, 1964; recorded signature song, "Wang Dang Doodle," 1965; released Koko Taylor, 1969, and Basic Soul, 1972; appeared at Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival, 1972; released first album on Alligator Records, I Got What It Takes, 1975; appeared at Chicago Blues Festival, 1990; released Force of Nature, 1993, and Royal Blue, 2000; opened Koko Taylor's Celebrity, a blues club, 2000.

Life's Work

Koko Taylor earned the title "Queen of Chicago Blues" from her intense live work on the South Side of the Chicago in the early 1960s. She has won a record 22 W.C. Handy Awards, scored a Grammy Award in 1984, and was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1999. In 1965 Taylor recorded "Wang Dang Doodle" for Chess Records, a million-copy seller that became her theme song. Her popularity even stretched to the white-dominated North Side of Chicago, and she proved to audiences that a woman could shout and sing the blues as well as any man. "Taylor is that rarity," noted Dave Marsh in the New Rolling Stone Record Guide, "a contemporary female Chicago blues performer." Although blues music began to decline in popularity during the 1970s, she maintained an active touring schedule and recorded several well-received albums. In 2000 she recorded Royal Blue with the help of a number of young musicians like Keb' Mo' and Shemekia Copeland, blues players who had been influenced by her career.

Taylor was born Cora Walton on September 28, 1935, in Memphis, Tennessee. Her father was a sharecropper, and she grew up with her siblings working on the family farm. It was a difficult environment. The family had no electricity or running water, and Taylor's mother died in 1939. "It wasn't an easy life," she told Mark Guarino in the Arlington Heights, Illinois, Daily Herald, "but it was a good life." Young Cora earned the nickname "Little Koko" because of her love of chocolate. She started singing in the choir at the Baptist church her family attended, and broadened her musical education by listening to a disc jockey named B.B. King on the radio. The songs of Bessie Smith, Big Mama Thornton, and Memphis Minnie introduced her to the blues, and she mimicked their songs, while her brothers backed her up with a makeshift guitar built out of bailing wire and a harmonica fashioned from a corncob. "My father, if he catch us singing the blues," she told Marty Racine in the Houston Chronicle, "we'd get a good beatin'. He said that was the devil's music."

In 1953 Walton married Robert "Pops" Taylor, a truck driver. The couple boarded a Greyhound bus to Chicago, and he went to work in a slaughterhouse while she worked as a domestic servant. "I raised their children, washed their clothes, ironed, cooked, did everything," she told Paul De Barros in the Seattle Times. In the couple's spare time they played the blues together and attended nightclubs on Chicago's South Side. With encouragement from her husband, Taylor began to sit in with Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, and Howlin' Wolf. Soon Taylor began to achieve a reputation in the world of blues music as a woman with a powerful set of pipes and a gravelly voice.

In 1962 Taylor met songwriter and bass player Willie Dixon, and he produced her first single for the U.S.A. label. He secured her a contract with Chess in 1964 and the following year wrote her most popular song for the label, "Wang Dang Doodle." At first, Taylor was reluctant to sing it: the song seemed silly to her. However, after the racier lyrics had been toned down she recorded it, and "Wang Dang Doodle," rose to number four on the R&B charts and sold over a million copies. Jim Mcguinness noted in the Bergen County, New Jersey, Record, "Besides being her signature tune, the song's dance beat helped define Taylor's uplifting take on the blues that she characterizes as 'foot-stomping music.'"

Even though Taylor never had another big hit, her reputation as a live act guaranteed that she had steady work. She also secured a job at the Wise Fools Pub, a club located on the white-dominated North Side of Chicago. Her popularity eventually allowed Taylor and her husband to quit their day jobs, and he became her manager. In 1969 she released Koko Taylor, an album that collected previous singles, and followed it with Basic Soul in 1972. Taylor also ventured outside Chicago, performing at the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival in 1972. In the early 1970s Chess Records began to have financial difficulties, and in 1975 they went out of business. Taylor then signed with the fledgling Alligator Records, released I Got What It Takes in 1975, and received her first Grammy nomination. Her follow-up in 1978, Earthshaker, included "Hey Bartender" and "I'm a Woman," two songs that became staples of her live repertoire.

In 1980 Taylor won her first W.C. Handy Award for Best Contemporary Female Artist and in 1984 she won her first Grammy Award, for her work on the compilation Blues Explosion. In 1988 tragedy struck when Taylor's touring bus missed a turn and rolled down the side of a mountain in Tennessee. Although Pops Taylor survived the accident, his health remained frail and he died of a heart attack a year later. "The last thing he told me," Taylor recalled to Racine, was "'I'll be dead and gone, but I want you to keep on doin' what you doin'. You love what you doin' too much. Don't give it up.'"

Taylor made her comeback in 1990, appearing at the Chicago Blues Festival. She also made a cameo appearance in David Lynch's movie, Wild at Heart. She continued to spend a great deal of time touring, playing as many as 100 dates a year during the 1990s. "It's not a bed of roses being out here," she told Madelyn Rosenberg in the Roanoke Times. "The roses come so far as I'm enjoying what I'm doing.... I look forward to performing. That's the reason I'm out here." In 1993 Taylor recorded Force of Nature and returned in 2000 with Royal Blue, featuring Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Johnnie Johnson, and others. She also opened a blues club called Koko Taylor's Celebrity, on the revitalized South Loop of Chicago. While Taylor sometimes speaks of "slowing down," she usually dismisses her own suggestion. "Why should I?" she asked Mike Boehm in the Los Angeles Times. "I mean, [with] all the fans I got out there enjoying what I'm doing? ... I got fans like that all over the world. Now why should I retire?"

Awards

Blues Hall of Fame, inductee, 1999; Grammy Award, 1984, for Best Traditional Blues Album; received 22 W.C. Handy Awards between 1980 and 2002.

Works

Selected discography

• "Wang Dang Doodle," Chess, 1965.
• Koko Taylor, Chess, 1969.
• Basic Soul, Chess, 1972.
• I Got What It Takes, Alligator, 1975.
• Queen of the Blues, Alligator, 1975.
• Earthshaker, Alligator, 1978.
• (Contributor) Blues Explosion, Atlantic, 1984.
• Force of Nature, Alligator, 1993.
• Royal Blue, Alligator, 2000.

Further Reading

Books

• Marsh, Dave, and John Swenson, eds., New Rolling Stone Record Guide, Random House, 1983, p. 505.

Periodicals

• Daily Herald (Arlington Heights, IL), June 9, 2000, p. 4.
• Houston Chronicle, November 5, 1998, p. 8.
• Los Angeles Times, June 21, 1996, p. 6.
• Record (Bergen County, NJ), March 9, 2001, p. 14.
• Roanoke Times, October 29, 1998, p. 1.
• Seattle Times, November 15, 2002, p. H6.

On-line

• "Koko Taylor," All Music Guide, www.allmusic.com (April 3, 2003).
• "KoKo Taylor," Biography Resource Center, www.galenet.com/servlet/BioRC (April 14, 2003).

— Ronnie D. Lankford Jr

See Koko Taylor Lyrics

• Born: September 28, 1935, Memphis, TN
• Died: June 03, 2009, Chicago, IL
• Active: '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, 2000s
• Genres: Blues
• Instrument: Vocals
• Representative Albums: "What It Takes: The Chess Years," "Koko Taylor," "I Got What It Takes"
• Representative Songs: "Wang Dang Doodle," "I Got What It Takes," "Big Boss Man"

Biography

Accurately dubbed "the Queen of Chicago blues" (and sometimes just the blues in general), Koko Taylor helped keep the tradition of big-voiced, brassy female blues belters alive, recasting the spirits of early legends like Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Big Mama Thornton, and Memphis Minnie for the modern age. Taylor's rough, raw vocals were perfect for the swaggering new electrified era of the blues, and her massive hit "Wang Dang Doodle" served notice that male dominance in the blues wasn't as exclusive as it seemed. After a productive initial stint on Chess, Taylor spent several decades on the prominent contemporary blues label Alligator, going on to win more W.C. Handy Awards than any other female performer in history, and establishing herself as far and away the greatest female blues singer of her time.

Koko was born Cora Walton on September 28, 1935, on a sharecropper's farm in Memphis, TN. Her mother died in 1939, and she and her siblings grew up helping their father in the fields; she got the nickname "Koko" because of her love of chocolate. Koko began singing gospel music in a local Baptist church; inspired by the music they heard on the radio, she and her siblings also played blues on makeshift instruments. In 1953, Koko married truck driver Robert "Pops" Taylor and moved with him to Chicago to look for work; settling on the South Side, Pops worked in a slaughterhouse and Koko got a job as a housemaid. The Taylors often played blues songs together at night, and frequented the bustling South Side blues clubs whenever they could; Pops encouraged Koko to sit in with some of the bands, and her singing -- which reflected not only the classic female blues shouters, but contemporaries Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf -- quickly made a name for her. In 1962, Taylor met legendary Chess Records songwriter/producer/bassist Willie Dixon, who was so impressed with her live performance that he took her under his wing. He produced her 1963 debut single, "Honky Tonky," for the small USA label, then secured her a recording contract with Chess.

Taylor made her recording debut for Chess in 1964 and hit it big the following year with the Dixon-penned "Wang Dang Doodle," which sold over a million copies and hit number four on the R&B charts. It became her signature song forever after, and it was also the last Chess single to hit the R&B Top Ten. Demand for Taylor's live act skyrocketed, even though none of her follow-ups sold as well, and as the blues audience began to shift from black to white, the relatively new Taylor became one of the first Chicago blues artists to command a following on the city's white-dominated North Side. Eventually, she and her husband were able to quit their day jobs, and he served as her manager; she also put together a backing band called the Blues Machine. With the release of two albums -- 1969's Koko Taylor, which featured a number of her previous singles; and 1972's Basic Soul -- Taylor's live gigs kept branching out further and further from Chicago, and when she played the 1972 Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival, the resulting live album on Atlantic helped bring her to a more national audience.

By the early '70s, Chess Records was floundering financially, and eventually went under in 1975. Taylor signed with a then-young Chicago-based label called Alligator, which grew into one of America's most prominent blues labels over the years. Taylor debuted for Alligator in 1975 with I Got What It Takes, an acclaimed effort that garnered her first Grammy nomination. Her 1978 follow-up, The Earthshaker, featured several tunes that became staples of her live show, including "I'm a Woman" and "Hey Bartender," and her popularity on the blues circuit just kept growing in spite of the music's commercial decline. In 1980, she won the first of an incredible string of W.C. Handy Awards (for Best Contemporary Female Artist), and over the next two decades, she would capture at least one more almost every year (save for 1989, 1997, and 1998). 1981 brought From the Heart of a Woman, and in 1984, Taylor won her first Grammy thanks to her appearance on Atlantic's various-artists compilation Blues Explosion, which was named Best Traditional Blues Album. She followed that success with the guest-laden Queen of the Blues in 1985, which won her a couple extra Handy Awards for Vocalist of the Year and Entertainer of the Year (no "female" qualifier attached). In 1987, she released her first domestic live album, Live in Chicago: An Audience With the Queen.

Tragedy struck in 1988. Taylor broke her shoulder, collarbone, and several ribs in a van accident while on tour, and her husband went into cardiac arrest; although Pops survived for the time being, his health was never the same, and he passed away some months later. After recuperating, Taylor made a comeback at the annual Chicago Blues Festival, and in 1990 she issued Jump for Joy, as well as making a cameo appearance in the typically bizarre David Lynch film Wild at Heart. Taylor followed it in 1993 with the aptly titled Force of Nature, after which she took a seven-year hiatus from recording; during that time, she remarried and continued to tour extensively, maintaining the stature she'd achieved with her '80s work as the living Queen of the Blues. In 2000, she finally returned with a new album, Royal Blue, which featured a plethora of guest stars: B.B. King, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Johnnie Johnson, and Keb' Mo'. Health issues forced another seven-year hiatus before she returned with the album Old School in 2007. ~ Steve Huey, All Music Guide

Royal Blue Buy this CD	Deluxe Edition Buy this CD	South Side Lady Buy this CD	Koko Taylor [Bonus Tracks] Buy this CD	Old School Buy this CD
Force of Nature Buy this CD	Jump for Joy Buy this CD	Audience with Koko Taylor Buy this CD	Live from Chicago Buy this CD	From the Heart of a Woman Buy this CD

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