They call her the Queen of the Blues, and the crown fits. Koko Taylor looks like she stepped out of a 1920s photo session, a vision of gleaming elegance: earrings and rings, a sequined blue dress fit for Bessie Smith, and a gold tooth that magnifies her smile.
It’s little wonder Taylor glows: She is days away from her headlining appearance at the Chicago Blues Festival on June 10; her first album in seven years, “Royal Blue” (Alligator), will be out June 6; and since November she has had her new nightclub, Koko Taylor’s Celebrity, on the southern edge of the Loop.
But beneath the regal exterior, Taylor is still a tough-as-nails country girl, as anyone who witnesses one of her smoldering, sweat-soaked concerts can attest. In conversation, Taylor blends a gracious, almost softspoken femininity with plainspoken wisdom, often delivered with a between-the-eyes directness rare in this age of carefully calculated celebrity.
As she sips a cup of morning coffee at her nightclub’s bar, the lioness roars when the word “retirement” is mentioned. Taylor’s age is no longer freely divulged, but blues reference works generally concur that she was born Cora Walton on Sept. 28, 1935, outside Memphis. Given that she’s a grandmother of two, with mild diabetes and hypertension, why does she insist on continuing to play at least 160 shows a year?
“A lot of people ask me the same question,” Taylor says, fixing me with a stare that suggests a schoolteacher addressing a 1st grader caught with a mouthful of spitballs. “And my answer to them all is I will retire when God is ready for me to retire. He’ll retire me, and no one else.
“If I retire today, what am I going to do? Watch Jerry Springer? I would just as soon go down, because that would really destroy me.”
Blues guitarist Lonnie Brooks has seen plenty of veteran performers tire of the grind. “A lot of people have to be drunk or high to get motivated to go on that stage every night,” he says. “But she’s like a kid on the first day of spring and you tell her, `OK, now you can go ride that bicycle.’ The joy–it’s no put-on. She can’t wait to get to that microphone.”
Bruce Iglauer, president of Chicago-based Alligator Records, which has been Taylor’s home for the last 26 years, says the singer “doesn’t know how to go through the motions. I saw her in South America a few years ago, and she was so ill she could barely walk. She has bouts of diverticulitis [an intestinal infection] that can leave her screaming in agony, and she spent a night in the hospital. The doctor told her she absolutely couldn’t go on stage. She insisted on playing a couple of songs, and ended up doing 90 minutes. She believes she should come off the stage exhausted. She will not even take a drink of water while she’s up there, because she feels that’s not what professionals do.”
That singular dedication to the music and her audience has made Taylor an icon, one of the half-dozen most famous living blues performers. Her records now sell in the range of 60,000 copies, extraordinary by independent-label standards, and she commands a worldwide audience on the festival circuit. She has won a Grammy and 19 W.C. Handy Awards for blues excellence, but her success has come grudgingly. Even after signing with Alligator and reviving her career in the late ’70s, she still had to find work cleaning hotel rooms to supplement her income. Taylor built her career “one show at a time,” Iglauer says. “It was one great performance followed by another, and 10 people more would show up each time she’d play.”
That work ethic was instilled at an early age, when Taylor grew up on a sharecropper’s farm outside Memphis. She and three brothers and two sisters slept on pallets in a shotgun shack with no running water or electricity. By the time she was 11, both her parents had died. She picked cotton to survive, and while a teenager moved to Chicago in the early ’50s to be with her future husband, Robert “Pop” Taylor. She found a job working as a domestic for North Shore families.
“I was on my knees scrubbing floors for $5 a day, and I was happy because I wasn’t making 50 cents a day in the cotton fields,” she says. “I thought I was getting rich.”
On weekends, she and her husband frequented the South Side clubs, and Taylor sat in with everyone from Howlin’ Wolf to Junior Wells and Buddy Guy. One night in the early ’60s, she was approached by a man who was already a legend in blues circles for his songwriting, producing and arranging skills.
“I didn’t know Willie Dixon from Adam’s house cat,” Taylor recalls. “But he says to me, `I love the way you sound’ and, `We got plenty of men out here singing the blues, but the world needs a woman like you with your voice to sing the blues.”‘
Dixon became Taylor’s mentor and confidant, in addition to her musical guide. Basement jam sessions at Dixon’s house at 52nd and Calumet helped her refine an already formidable voice, a heavy, accusatory alto that was the female equivalent of Howlin’ Wolf’s baritone growl. Dixon had to plead with her to cut a version of his ribald “Wang Dang Doodle” in 1965, but when she did, it became a huge hit for Chess Records, selling a reputed million copies. It was also one of the last major chart songs for the label, which folded in the early ’70s, leaving Taylor back where she started, scrapping for a living.
“It was a devastating time for my mom,” says Taylor’s daughter, Joyce “Cookie” Threatt, who helps her mom run the nightclub. “It was hard to leave Chess and Willie Dixon, who was her promoter, manager and friend. When Willie moved to California, they talked everyday. Then she met Bruce [Iglauer]. It was like God put him there.”
But as with everything in Taylor’s life, she had to work to get a break. Iglauer, who was just starting his label when the blues revival of the ’60s was losing steam, at first wanted nothing to do with her.
“I kept bugging him to give me a chance,” Taylor says. “He would say he would think about it, which was a nice way of getting rid of me. Every two weeks I’d call, and finally he said he’d give it a try.”
Iglauer says he was uncertain of his abilities to produce a singer instead of an instrumentalist like his first signing, boogie guitarist Hound Dog Taylor. “I came from a world where guitar players ruled and stand-up vocalists didn’t do very well,” he says. “For me every record I made was a gamble back then, and if the gamble failed, the whole company could go.”
But once Iglauer signed Taylor, he was impressed with her moxie. “Soon after I told her I’d try to get her some gigs, she called me and said, `I’ve put a down payment on a van, I have four musicians in rehearsal and I’m ready to go. Get me some work.’ She never expected me to hold her hand or take care of her business-wise. She was taking care of business on her own.”
Taylor was already a distinctive artist when she came to Alligator, and with Iglauer’s help began exploring a more vulnerable side to her persona on select ballads such as her epochal version of the Etta James hit “I’d Rather Go Blind.” Even when recording other people’s material, the singer put her idiosyncratic touch on it, usually singing it a cappella in the studio, with the musicians following her with chord changes and voicings.
Of all the female blues singers still active, she retains the closest connection to the raw Mississippi Delta sound that she first heard in childhood while listening to radio shows hosted by B.B. King and Rufus Thomas. “But she brings a lot of funky syncopations to her blues,” Iglauer says. “Listen to the way she does `Wang Dang Doodle’ now, and it’s slower, funkier and more grinding. It’s her personality coming through larger than life.”
With Taylor dedicated to touring, it took seven years before “Royal Blue” was completed. But the wait was worth it: Taylor sounds as tough and formidable as ever, lacing her tales of domestic strife–usually involving a two-timing lover who gets his comeuppance from the Queen–with salty humor. Taylor originals such as “The Man Next Door,” “Old Woman” and “Ernestine” work as a trilogy of stories on the subjects of lust and betrayal.
“She’s writing about everyday life, though not her life necessarily,” says her daughter. “She grew up singing in [the Baptist] church in Memphis, and people come into church to get washed. They don’t come in there already clean.”
Taylor’s no-nonsense attitude doesn’t just apply to her songs. She had to be tough to command respect in a male-dominated business. In addition, another foray into the club world, Koko Taylor’s Chicago Blues, closed in April 1996 after being open only 14 months.
“I’ve seen her on nights when she was not happy with her band’s performance,” Iglauer says. “After the show, she’ll call the band into the dressing room, and those guys come out of there shaking. She doesn’t lay her hands on people, but she knows how to hurt a guy. We’ve been working together for 26 years, but that doesn’t mean it’s been a happy marriage for every moment. I’ve been fired more than once. I know that person laying into me. It’s the person who picked cotton. She’s got some calluses inside, and some rough edges. She’s twice as tough as most blues performers because she is a woman, and had to fight not to be taken advantage of when she started out.”
Back at the bar, the Queen is as sweet as can be. She just spent Mother’s Day surrounded by friends, her daughter’s family and her husband of four years, Hays Harris. After Pop died in 1989, she was devastated. But years later she met real estate developer Harris through a mutual friend and says “it feels like a honeymoon when we’re together.”
“The future, it isn’t promised to you,” she says. “But it looks good, it sounds promising and I’m looking forward to my career reaching the sky. And if we land somewhere in the clouds, I’ll be happy with that.”
Building her club is her way of returning a favor, providing a space for young musicians to perform the way she did 40 years ago, when she was still an unknown blues singer. “They’d say, `Come on up and let Koko sing,”‘ she says with a laugh. “And I did.” Little did she know that those weekend flings would soon come to define who she is.
As Lonnie Brooks says, “When she sings, it’s like eating or breathing. She has to have it. She has to have this feeling to live. I do believe she’d rather die than quit.”
