Posted by chicagomedia.org on June 04, 2009 at 09:13:30:
Originally posted: June 3, 2009
Chicago blues legend Koko Taylor dies at 80
Chicago blues icon Koko Taylor died Wednesday afternoon at age 80, after surgery May 19 to correct a gastrointestinal bleed.
"She was recovering slowly but surely, and then she had a real bad night," said Marc Lipkin, a spokesman for Taylor's longtime Chicago-based label, Alligator Records. Taylor was recovering from her surgery at Northwestern Memorial Hospital when she died.
She had performed only weeks earlier at the Blues Music Awards ceremony in Memphis, Tenn., where she received her record 29th Blues Music Award.
Born Cora Walton in 1928 in Memphis, Tenn., she was orphaned by the time she was 11, and had to work the cotton fields to support herself. She came to Chicago in 1952 with her future husband, Robert "Pops" Taylor, to escape the plantation life and "look for work, start a new life, get married and have a family."
She had no intention of becoming a singer. But she was inspired by the blues songs of Memphis Minnie and Big Mama Thornton at an early age, and had sung gospel in church. When she came to Chicago, she was thrilled by the music she encountered in the South Side clubs, amplified and raucous, a harder incarnation of the backporch 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 once told the Tribune. "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 what would become her signature song, "Wang Dang Doodle," in the mid-'60s for Chess Records. Taylor was sheepish about the risque subject matter because of her gospel background, but it soon came to define her feisty style.
"All music derives from blues and gospel," she said. "When you seek a higher power, that gives you the gospel. When you want to share your experience so that you can move on and go on, that's the blues. It doesn't have to be depressing. It's life itself."
(Greg Kot, Chicago Tribune)