Courtesy of Koko Taylor

A FIRESIDE CHAT WITH KOKO TAYLOR


I love Chicago. As the backdrop to Ferris Bueller, the city also hosts the country's finest steakhouse, The Chop House, Shaw's Crab House on Hubbard, and one of the oldest cigar stores (est. 1857), Iwan Ries. I love Chicago and I love Chicago blues. And who's the queen of Chicago blues? There is only one queen and there is only one Koko Taylor and they are one in the same. Willie Dixon was right on about Taylor and she proves it nightly with her rendition of "Wang Dang Doodle." Listening to it on Koko Taylor (Chess) doesn't do it justice. Get it live and it lives on long after her set closes. I sat down with Taylor in the middle of yet another cross-country tour to talk about her life and love of the blues. As always, I bring it to you unedited and in her own words.

FRED JUNG: Let's start from the beginning.

KOKO TAYLOR: The way that I got into the blues was first of all, I was born and raised with the blues, under the blues, around the blues, so during the years when I was growing up, I didn't know anything else but the blues. Back in those years, the only thing you could hear on the radio was blues. Now, you have rap and pop and only these other music that you hear today, they were not happening on the radio back then. So I grew up listening to the blues and listening to gospel and singing gospel in a little Baptist church down in Memphis, Tennessee, where I grew up at. And what really stuck to my ribs was the blues. My dad always said that we had to go to church on Sundays and sing gospel, but my sisters and brothers, along with myself, we loved hearing the blues, so we would listen to the radio behind his back. We would go to the cotton fields because I was raised on a cotton farm. We would go to the cotton fields during the day and in the evening, after we would get out of church on Sundays, we would go behind the house and listen to our little radio. You had a disc jockey by the name of B.B. King and I'm talking about the king of the blues. He was on a radio station over in Arkansas and he would play the blues 15 minutes a day, nothing but the blues. We also had a deejay in Memphis named Rufus Thomas and Rufus had thirty minutes every day and he played the blues. One day, Rufus Thomas played a song by an older, fine artist named Memphis Minnie. He played this record called "Me and My Chauffeur" and on the flipside of that record was called "Black Rat Swing" and that was the beginning of my listening and really paying attention to what really stuck to my ribs and that was that record by Memphis Minnie. On down the road, as I kept listening to the blues, Muddy Waters became the number one idol of my career, Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters.


FJ: What was it about the late Muddy Waters?

KOKO TAYLOR: Because it was something about the lyric that they used in their songs, the way they addressed their lyrics that come out of their mouth to the people who is listening. Like I was listening and it was something about their singing that really made me pay attention, made me really love what they were doing, and I kept telling myself that I sure wish that I can become a singer and sound as good as these guys. It was something about their songs that really soaked into your heart, your mind. It was something that they left on your mind.


FJ: It wasn't long before you too were doing the same.

KOKO TAYLOR: You see, Fred, singing I learned later, singing is just like putting money in the bank. That is how I feel today. If you don't put nothing in the bank, you can't draw nothing out. So we are talking about the people, my fans right today, when I go to the stage, I'm all excited and I am thrilled and I am honored looking at all these people, this audience out here, waiting for little old me. I get up there and I put my heart out. I give them my heart out of every song that I sing and I'm thinking that I am at the bank now. I'm ready to deposit and when people, after the show is over, a lot of people walk up to me and they will go like, "Oh, that song you just sung. I would rather go blind." "Oh, I'm a woman and I've never heard the blues before. This is my first experience, but after listening to you, I'll be listening to the blues from now on." That makes me feel like a deposit of a million dollars.


FJ: You life's journey was a very difficult one.

KOKO TAYLOR: It was. I grew up the hard way, but you know what, Fred? In a way, I am thankful that I grew up the hard way because that hard way taught me to be a real woman, a tough woman, an honest, hard-working woman and not a woman. Because I'm here in Chicago under the bright lights and the big crowds and being an entertainer, that hard life made me know how to keep my head on straight. I've never been in no kind of trouble for doing nothing that was wrong and that I had no business doing. Why? Because I was raised that way.


FJ: From the Memphis farm to Chicago's Southside, a very arduous life cleaning houses to make ends meet.

KOKO TAYLOR: It absolutely is, very poor, very hard, very dangerous and these are some of the things that I'm talking about. It is a lot of good people here, but then it is a lot of people that is not so good. You can easily be influenced in going down the wrong way. If you ain't got your head on straight, you can easily be led in the wrong direction, doing the wrong thing, saying the wrong thing, and that is one of the things that I tell all of the young people that is coming up today, growing up today and trying to do something, some of them out there. They're young. I know that I am well enough to talk to them like this. I give them that mother advice. "Look, you're doing a good job. Keep on doing it. And don't let nobody disencourage you or turn you around, but the most important thing, keep your head on straight." That is how I was taught, preaching. It is good from the soul (laughing).


FJ: What were some of the things that helped you to become a strong, black woman?

KOKO TAYLOR: What makes me strong, and I would say that this would help a lot of young girls, mothers, and older whatever, is just being who I am and I have to let, especially the men, I have to let them know. Hey, I'm out here on the road. I ain't got a surrounding of body guards with me. I don't need them. I've got musicians working for me. I have to have musicians. I have to have a band, but baby, believe me when I tell you, every one of them know that we ain't got no push-over. We ain't got no jellyfish here. We can say anything to her. We can act any kind of way. We can do anything because they know straight up, the same way they came into this world, I'm going to tell them to get out. Be gone with the quickness, because if you don't go, I'm going to send you. In these types of things, you have to be strong. That is what makes me a strong woman. A lot of people ask me, how do I stay out here? How do I do what I do? It is because I am strong.


FJ: Even a strong woman needs a helping hand every now and then and Willie Dixon got you signed to Chess and produced your debut.

KOKO TAYLOR: Willie Dixon was like my right arm. The way I met Willie Dixon, well, I guess it was about a year after I moved to Chicago. Like I told you, Fred, I loved singing, but I had never really did it, but I knew how to do it. When I got to Chicago, my husband and I would go around to different local clubs in the Southside on the weekend when we weren't at our jobs. This was just to have a Saturday night fish fry with the other guys and women and everything, dancing and all that stuff. But my thing was to sing and every time I go around a band, they would call me up, "Come on up and do a tune with us." This particular time, Howlin' Wolf, we was in his club, not his club, but where he was working and he called me up, "We got little old Koko in the house." I done weighed about ninety pounds soaking wet. He'd call me up and I'd go up there and do a couple of tunes like that. This particular time, Willie Dixon was in the audience and when I finished and came down, he said, "My God, I never heard a woman sing the blues like you sing the blues. That is what the world needs today, a woman like you to sing the blues and stick to the roots of old, traditional blues." That is what I do.


FJ: Your blues career began in the early Sixties, a time when the color of your skin was an issue to many white Americans and you were a woman, so the cards were not particularly in your favor.

KOKO TAYLOR: That meant I was the last priority.


FJ: That must have been a very trying time for you?

KOKO TAYLOR: It was, Fred. And that is one of the things that I meant when I said that I was a strong woman. There was a lot of things, there were a lot of strikes against me, but I just kept on stepping, kept on looking up with my head up and not down. I didn't look back because I was afraid that if I looked back, I might fall down. And I just kept on going and kept on doing what I was doing and I was determined. Anybody, if you really want to do something, you have got to have a determined mind and stick to whatever you're doing, especially when you know it's right.


FJ: Willie Dixon penned "Wang Dang Doodle," a personal favorite of mine. It has become the signature piece in your songbook and was a tremendous hit for you at the time.

KOKO TAYLOR: That seems to be one of everybody's favorites. It is the biggest seller that I've had so far as selling a million copies. I've had a lot of songs that sold a lot and was very good, but it wasn't like "Wang Dang Doodle." And Willie Dixon wrote that song especially for me. He said (in her best and very impressive Willie Dixon imitation), "I wrote this song for you. I know you can do it well."


FJ: There must not be a night that goes by where an audience member fails to request "Wang Dang Doodle?"

KOKO TAYLOR: Every time I go to a gig, that is the first thing I hear. As old as that song is, thirty years old, it is still one of the most requested songs of my show, anywhere I go.


FJ: You were signed to Alligator Records in mid-Seventies, becoming their first female artist and you are a staple for that label to this day.

KOKO TAYLOR: Right, and he didn't want me. He didn't want me. When I went to Alligator and asked them about him taking on me with the rest of them around then. He didn't have but three people at that time and that was Hound Dog Taylor (Theodore Roosevelt Taylor) and Son Seals and I forgot who else, but anyway, like about three people and he said, "No." He wasn't interested in taking on a woman because he had never dealt with a woman that don't play an instrument and just excuses, excuses. Like I said, Fred, he didn't want me. But I was determined and I kept on bugging him. I just kept calling him on the phone. He'd hate to hang up on my face, but he would always give me a nice excuse to get off the phone. I would call him back the next day (laughing). That went on and on until he just got tired of me bugging him and he said, "Well, OK, I can't make you no promises, but I will tell you what I'll do, I'll take you on and give it a try. We'll give you a try and see how it works out and if it works out, OK. If it don't you know I tried, but I ain't promising you nothing."


FJ: Well, it worked out for the both of you.

KOKO TAYLOR: It worked out. I've been with Bruce, twenty-three years.


FJ: Two more and you deserve a watch.

KOKO TAYLOR: (Laughing).


FJ: The blues is inherently a black music, but these days, blues crosses racial and gender lines.

KOKO TAYLOR: Oh, yeah. I definitely know it is because if it hadn't been, I wouldn't be traveling all over the world singing the blues. The blues is just as popular in Europe and all of those foreign countries as it is right in the United States. The blues is very popular here in the States than it has ever been in the past because the blues has always been at the end of the totem pole. But now, it is much different and much better than it has been. The blues, I can't put it all the way on top of the shelf because it is still behind all other music to a certain extent. Every city I have gone to, you can turn your radio on twenty-four, twenty-four, and they are playing the music that they are playing today that is beautiful music and I love it, but when it comes to the blues, some of the radio stations has so and so and so and so, playing the blues every Saturday from four to six. So that is making a difference. The blues is not good enough to be played on big radio stations along with these other types of music that they are playing every day.


FJ: What is the key to surviving and thriving as a blues singer?

KOKO TAYLOR: It is doing something that you want to do, something that you love and enjoy yourself. You've got to first want to do it and enjoy yourself. You've got to like what your doing.


FJ: Can someone learn to be a great blues singer or is it something that you are inherently born with?

KOKO TAYLOR: Well, to me, Fred, I think you can learn and I also think some people get it because they were inherited to sing the blues. It was just inherited for me. This ain't nothing I went to school and studied. I didn't learn to do it. I was born with the blues. As far as I can remember, knee high to a duck, I was singing the blues.


FJ: What is the blues to Koko Taylor?

KOKO TAYLOR: The blues is something that I love and something that I can reach out to other people all over the world and touch them with the feeling and I am honored to know that I have turned in a lot of people on to the blues by just listening to me. The blues is a feeling that you get from nowhere else, but from the heart.


FJ: And your heart overflows with the blues?

KOKO TAYLOR: Oh, yes. It definitely does.


FJ: Can you imagine doing something else?

KOKO TAYLOR: Nothing else, but keep on doing what I'm doing. If I reach the sky and land somewhere in the clouds, I'd be happy as long as I'm singing the blues.


Fred Jung is the Editor-In-Chief and is donating his jazz reference books to science (they aren't worth shit). Comments? Email Him