[Dixielandjazz] KoKo Taylor Obit

[Stephen G Barbone]

June 3, 2009
Koko Taylor, Blues Queen, Dies at 80

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
CHICAGO (AP) -- Koko Taylor, a sharecropper's daughter whose regal  
bearing and powerful voice earned her the sobriquet "Queen of the  
Blues," has died after complications from surgery. She was 80.

Taylor died Wednesday at Northwestern Memorial Hospital about two  
weeks after having surgery for a gastrointestinal bleed, said Marc  
Lipkin, director of publicity for her record label, Alligator Records,  
which made the announcement.

The break for Tennessee-born Taylor came in 1962, when arranger/ 
composer Willie Dixon, impressed by her voice, got her a Chess  
recording contract and produced several singles (and two albums) for  
her, including the million-selling 1965 hit, "Wang Dang Doodle," which  
she called silly, but which launched her recording career.

 From Chicago blues clubs, Taylor took her raucous, gritty, good-time  
blues on the road to blues and jazz festivals around the nation, and  
into Europe. After the Chess label folded, she signed with Alligator  
Records.

In most years, she performed at least 100 concerts a year.

"Blues is my life," Taylor once said. "It's a true feeling that comes  
from the heart, not something that just comes out of my mouth. Blues  
is what I love, and blues is what I always do."

Taylor appeared on national television numerous times, and was the  
subject of a PBS documentary and had a small part in director David  
Lynch's "Wild at Heart."

In the course of her more than 40-year career, Taylor was nominated  
seven times for Grammy awards and won in 1984.

Born Cora Walton just outside Memphis, Tenn., Taylor said her dream to  
become a blues singer was nurtured in the cotton fields outside her  
family's sharecropper shack.

"I used to listen to the radio, and when I was about 18 years old,  
B.B. King was a disc jockey and he had a radio program, 15 minutes a  
day, over in West Memphis, Arkansas and he would play the blues," she  
said in a 1990 interview. "I would hear different records and things  
by Muddy Waters, Bessie Smith, Memphis Minnie, Sonnyboy Williams and  
all these people, you know, which I just loved."

Although her father encouraged her to sing only gospel music, Cora and  
her siblings would sneak out back with their homemade instruments and  
play the blues. With one brother accompanying on a guitar made out of  
bailing wire and nails and one brother on a fife made out of a  
corncob, she began on the path to blues woman.

Orphaned at 11, Koko -- a nickname she earned because of an early love  
of chocolate -- at age 18 moved to Chicago with her soon-to-be- 
husband, the late Robert "Pops" Taylor, in search for work.

Setting up house on the South Side, Koko found work as a cleaning  
woman for a wealthy family living in the city's northern suburbs. At  
night and on weekends, she and her husband frequented Chicago's clubs,  
where many the artists heard on the radio performed.

"I started going to these local clubs, me and my husband, and  
everybody got to know us," Taylor said. "And then the guys would start  
letting me sit in, you know, come up on the bandstand and do a tune."

In addition to performing, she operated a Chicago nightclub, which  
closed in November 2001 because her daughter, club manager Joyce  
Threatt, developed severe asthma and could no longer manage a smoky  
nightclub.