Valedictory: Koko Taylor Chicago Blues Legend

[Confluence Logansport]

Ms. Taylor was known to frequent the Chicago Blues Fest even when she
was not performing. RIP Koko Taylor.

Koko Taylor, the Grammy Award-winning "Queen of the Blues," died this
afternoon at Northwestern Memorial Hospital of complications from
surgery, according to Marc Lipkin of Alligator Records. She was 80.

Taylor, born Coral Walton on a sharecropper's farm outside Memphis,
came to Chicago in 1952 and worked as a house cleaner. She began to
sit in with blues bands and in the early 1960s signed a contract with
Chess Records after being approached by Willie Dixon. In 1965 she
recorded her signature song, "Wang Dang Doodle."

She sang that song at her final performance last month in Memphis at
the Blues Music Awards after being honored as Traditional Blues Female
Artist of the Year.

Survivors include Taylor's husband, Hays Harris; daughter Joyce
Threatt; son-in-law Lee Threatt, grandchildren Lee, Jr. and Wendy, and
three great-grandchildren.

Funeral arrangements are being made.

Taylor had been playing 200 shows a year for decades. But that ended
in October 2003 when she was struck down by a heart attack and slipped
into a 28-day coma. Friends feared for her life. When she emerged from
the hospital after four months, she had to re-learn how to walk. She
didn't perform again until the spring of 2004.

When Taylor came to Chicago, she was thrilled by the music she
encountered in the South Side clubs, amplified and raucous, a harder
incarnation of the back-porch brand of blues she had heard in the
South. It was the heyday of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, and "Pops"
Taylor persuaded them to let Koko sing. "I closed my eyes and I got
started," she said in a Tribune article published in March 2007.
"There were no other women on the scene."

But her big voice won her a following, and she was instantly accepted.
Dixon in particular became a mentor, and persuaded her to record "Wang
Dang Doodle." Taylor was sheepish about the risqué subject matter
because of her gospel background, but it soon came to define her
feisty style.