AUTOGRAPHED KOKO TAYLOR BERLIN 11 OKTOBER 1981 MAGAZINE PHOTO BY NORBERT HESS

Description

KOKO TAYLOR MAGAZINE PAGE  OF HER IN BERLIN 11 OKTOBER 1981 WITH PHOTO BY NORBERT HESS SIGNED MEASURING APPROXIMATELY 4 1/4 X 4 3/4 INCH
Koko Taylor was an American singer whose style encompassed Chicago blues, electric blues, rhythm and blues and soul blues. Sometimes called "The Queen of the Blues", she was known for her rough, powerful vocals
Quotes
“Raucous, gritty, good-time blues….Taylor belts out blues in a gravel voice with ferocious intensity. Foot-stomping music that’s rough, raw and wonderfully upbeat.”
—PEOPLE
“Chicago’s best blues singer…she has fire in her lungs.”
—CHICAGO SUN-TIMES
“This seemingly ageless wonder pours her heart out with fire and emotion. Her singing is full of raw growls and grunts, her voice often building in intensity until it explodes.”
—LA TIMES
“One of the greatest female singers in R&B history.”
—AUSTIN CHRONICLE
“Searing power and a steely emotional tautness …she radiates a warmth that borders on the spiritual; few performers in any genre are as capable as she is of generating genuine intimacy out of fervid house-rocking moments….a living treasure.”
—CHICAGO READER
“Koko Taylor will kick your butt up and down the room…raw, rompin’, stompin’, barn-burnin’ blues. Contemporary blues just don’t get any better than this.”
—BLUES ACCESS
“Mother Nature’s got nothing on blues legend Koko Taylor.”
—SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER-CHRONICLE
“Raucous, raunchy, good humored Chicago-styled blues…she unleashed like a hurricane. She attacks her material like a pitbull, ripping through the lyrics with a vengeance.”
—JAZZ TIMES
“Her punchy, hard-driving blues can still send El Nino-sized shivers through the atmosphere …. There may be no living artist who more palpably embodies the jolting, live-wire feel of Chicago blues than Koko Taylor….she is indeed a force of nature, putting her bluesy, blistering vocal signature on everything she touches.”
—CHICAGO TRIBUNE
“Koko Taylor is the blues, a sweaty, growling goddess of down-and-dirty. Sheer, unstoppable shouting power, full steam ahead and damn the torpedoes. Rocking, good-time blues…booming, earthy grit.”
—BOSTON GLOBE
“When Koko Taylor cuts loose, she rattles the walls.”
—SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN“
A howl, a growl and a full-throated fury that forms deep in her abdomen and reaches a roar by the time it hits her mouth.”
—DETROIT FREE PRESS
Biography
Grammy Award-winning blues legend Koko Taylor, 80, died on June 3, 2009 in her hometown of Chicago, IL, as a result of complications following her May 19 surgery to correct a gastrointestinal bleed. On May 7, 2009, the critically acclaimed Taylor, known worldwide as the “Queen of the Blues,” won her 29th Blues Music Award (for Traditional Female Blues Artist Of The Year), making her the recipient of more Blues Music Awards than any other artist. In 2004 she received the NEA National Heritage Fellowship Award, which is among the highest honors given to an American artist. Her most recent CD, 2007’s Old School, was nominated for a Grammy (eight of her nine Alligator albums were Grammy-nominated). She won a Grammy in 1984 for her guest appearance on the compilation album Blues Explosion on Atlantic.
Born Cora Walton on a sharecropper’s farm just outside Memphis, TN, on September 28, 1928, Koko, nicknamed for her love of chocolate, fell in love with music at an early age. Inspired by gospel music and WDIA blues disc jockeys B.B. King and Rufus Thomas, Taylor began belting the blues with her five brothers and sisters, accompanying themselves on their homemade instruments. In 1952, Taylor and her soon-to-be-husband, the late Robert “Pops” Taylor, traveled to Chicago with nothing but, in Koko’s words, “thirty-five cents and a box of Ritz Crackers.”
In Chicago, “Pops” worked for a packing company, and Koko cleaned houses. Together they frequented the city’s blues clubs nightly. Encouraged by her husband, Koko began to sit in with the city’s top blues bands, and soon she was in demand as a guest artist. One evening in 1962 Koko was approached by arranger/composer Willie Dixon. Overwhelmed by Koko’s performance, Dixon landed Koko a Chess Records recording contract, where he produced her several singles, two albums and penned her million-selling 1965 hit “Wang Dang Doodle,” which would become Taylor’s signature song.
After Chess Records was sold, Taylor found a home with the Chicago’s Alligator Records in 1975 and released the Grammy-nominated I Got What It Takes. She recorded eight more albums for Alligator between 1978 and 2007, received seven more Grammy nominations and made numerous guest appearances on various albums and tribute recordings. Koko appeared in the films Wild At Heart, Mercury Rising and Blues Brothers 2000. She performed on Late Night With David Letterman, Late Night With Conan O’Brien, CBS-TV’s This Morning, National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, CBS-TV’s Early Edition, and numerous regional television programs.
Over the course of her 40-plus-year career, Taylor received every award the blues world has to offer. On March 3, 1993, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley honored Taylor with a “Legend Of The Year” Award and declared “Koko Taylor Day” throughout Chicago. In 1997, she was inducted into the Blues Foundation’s Hall of Fame. A year later, Chicago Magazine named her “Chicagoan Of The Year” and, in 1999, Taylor received the Blues Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2009 Taylor performed in Washington, D.C. at The Kennedy Center Honors honoring Morgan Freeman.
Koko Taylor was one of very few women who found success in the male-dominated blues world. She took her music from the tiny clubs of Chicago’s South Side to concert halls and major festivals all over the world. She shared stages with every major blues star, including Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, Junior Wells and Buddy Guy as well as rock icons Robert Plant and Jimmy Page.
Taylor’s final performance was on May 7, 2009 in Memphis at the Blues Music Awards, where she sang “Wang Dang Doodle” after receiving her award for Traditional Blues Female Artist Of The Year.
SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY
SOLO RECORDINGS:
•Koko Taylor (Chess)
•Basic Soul (Chess)
•South Side Baby (originally Black & Blue;
reissued on Evidence)
•I Got What It Takes (Alligator)
•The Earthshaker (Alligator)
•From The Heart Of A Woman (Alligator)
•Queen Of The Blues (Alligator)
•Live From Chicago—An Audience
With The Queen (Alligator)
•Jump For Joy (Alligator)
•Force Of Nature (Alligator)
•Royal Blue (Alligator)
•Deluxe Edition (Alligator)
•Old School (Alligator)
OTHER APPEARANCES:
•Blues Deluxe (XRT)
•The Alligator Records 20th
Anniversary Tour (Alligator)
•The Alligator Records Christmas
Collection (Alligator)
•Alligator Records’ Genuine
Houserockin’ Christmas (Alligator)
•Blues Explosion (Atlantic)
•Blues Summit (B.B. King – MCA)
•Blues Down Deep: Songs Of
Janis Joplin (House Of Blues)
•Blues Power: Songs Of Eric Clapton
(House Of Blues)
Koko Taylor, (Cora Walton), American blues singer (born Sept. 28, 1928, Bartlett, Tenn.—died June 3, 2009, Chicago, Ill.), forged a musical career that spanned nearly half a century and earned her the nickname “Queen of the Blues.” Both of Taylor’s parents had died by the time she was 11 years old, and she and her five siblings picked cotton to survive. In the evenings they listened to such blues artists as Bessie Smith, Howlin’ Wolf, and Muddy Waters. In the early 1950s, she moved to Chicago with Robert (“Pops”) Taylor, whom she later married. She worked as a housekeeper during the day and frequented blues clubs at night. It was while singing at one of these clubs in 1963 that Taylor came to the attention of Chess Records producer Willie Dixon, who promptly signed her to that label. Taylor was soon recording with such blues legends as Buddy Guy, Big Walter Horton, and Robert Nighthawk. Under Dixon’s guidance, Taylor released a pair of albums and a number of singles for Chess, most notably the 1965 hit “Wang Dang Doodle.” That song, which thrust Taylor into the mainstream, sold more than a million copies and reached the top five on the Billboard rhythm-and-blues chart. With the demise of Chess in the early 1970s, Taylor moved to Alligator Records, where she recorded a string of albums over the next three decades that helped solidify her place as a preeminent female blues vocalist, although none of these albums matched the popular success she achieved with “Wang Dang Doodle.” She garnered eight Grammy Award nominations and collected more than two dozen Blues Music Awards. Health issues slowed her recording output in the 2000s, but Taylor’s final album, Old School (2007), featured vocals as robust and brassy as ever, and she continued to perform live up until a month before her death.
Koko Taylor (born Cora Anna Walton, September 28, 1928 – June 3, 2009)[2][3][4] was an American singer whose style encompassed Chicago blues, electric blues, rhythm and blues and soul blues. Sometimes called "The Queen of the Blues",[1] she was known for her rough, powerful vocals.
Contents
1
Life and career
2
Awards
3
Discography
4
See also
5
References
6
External links
Life and career
Born on a farm near Memphis, Tennessee, Taylor was the daughter of a sharecropper. She left Tennessee for Chicago in 1952 with her husband, Robert "Pops" Taylor, a truck driver.[3] In the late 1950s, she began singing in blues clubs in Chicago. She was spotted by Willie Dixon in 1962, and this led to more opportunities for performing and her first recordings. In 1963 she had a single on USA Records,[5] and in 1964 a cut on a Chicago blues collection on Spivey Records, called Chicago Blues.[6] In 1964 Dixon brought Taylor to Checker Records, a subsidiary label of Chess Records, for which she recorded "Wang Dang Doodle", a song written by Dixon and recorded by Howlin' Wolf five years earlier. The record became a hit, reaching number four on the R&B chart and number 58 on the pop chart in 1966,[7] and selling a million copies.[3] She recorded several versions of the song over the years, including a live rendition at the 1967 American Folk Blues Festival, with the harmonica player Little Walter and the guitarist Hound Dog Taylor. Her subsequent recordings, both original songs and covers, did not achieve as much success on the charts.
"Taylor sounds like you always wanted those women with Big in front of their names to sound—powerful, even rough, without ever altogether abandoning her rather feminine register."
— Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981)[8]
Taylor became better known by touring in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and she became accessible to a wider record-buying public when she signed a recording contract with Alligator Records in 1975. She recorded nine albums for Alligator, eight of which were nominated for Grammy awards, and came to dominate ranks of female blues singers, winning twenty-nine W. C. Handy/Blues Music Awards.[9]
She survived a near-fatal car crash in 1989. In the 1990s, she appeared in the films Blues Brothers 2000 and Wild at Heart. She opened a blues club on Division Street in Chicago in 1994, which relocated to Wabash Avenue, in Chicago's South Loop, in 2000 (the club is now closed).
In 2003, she appeared as a guest with Taj Mahal in an episode of the television series Arthur. In 2009, she performed with Umphrey's McGee at the band's New Year's Eve concert at the Auditorium Theater, in Chicago.
Taylor influenced Bonnie Raitt, Shemekia Copeland, Janis Joplin, Shannon Curfman, and Susan Tedeschi.
In her later years, she performed over 70 concerts a year and resided just south of Chicago, in Country Club Hills, Illinois.
In 2008, the Internal Revenue Service said that Taylor owed 0,000 in unpaid taxes, penalties and interest, for the years 1998, 2000 and 2001. In those years combined, her adjusted gross income was 9,000.[10]
Taylor's final performance was at the Blues Music Awards, on May 7, 2009. She suffered complications from surgery for gastrointestinal bleeding on May 19 and died on June 3.[11]
On June 25, 2019, The New York Times Magazine listed Koko Taylor among hundreds of artists whose material was reportedly destroyed in the 2008 Universal fire.[12]
Awards
Grammy Award for Best Traditional Blues Album, 1985
Howlin' Wolf Award, 1996
Blues Hall of Fame, inducted 1997
Blues Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, 1999
NEA National Heritage Fellowship, 2004
Blues Music Award (formerly the W. C. Handy Award), 32 nominations with 29 wins in the following categories:[9]
Entertainer of the Year (1985)
Female Artist (1981, 1995)
Song of the Year (2008)
Traditional Blues Album (2008)
Traditional Blues Female Artist (1992, 1993, 1999–2005, 2008, 2009)
Vocalist of the Year (1985)
7th Annual Independent Music Awards for Best Blues Album, 2008[13]
Discography
Love You Like a Woman, November 30, 1968 (Charly Records)
Koko Taylor, 1969 (MCA/Chess Records)
Basic Soul, 1972 (Chess)
South Side Lady, 1973 (Black and Blue Records)
I Got What It Takes, 1975 (Alligator Records)
Southside Baby, 1975 (Black & Blue)
The Earthshaker, 1978 (Alligator)
From the Heart of a Woman, 1981 (Alligator)
Queen of the Blues, 1985 (Alligator)
Live from Chicago: An Audience with the Queen, 1987 (Alligator)
Wang Dang Doodle, 1991 (Huub Records)
Jump for Joy, 1992 (Alligator)
Force of Nature, 1993 (Alligator)
Royal Blue, 2000 (Alligator)
Old School, 2007 (Alligator)
See also
Chicago Blues Festival