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Koko Taylor – The Long Blues Road
By Roger Kuhns - Interview for Door County Compass,
August 10, 2001
Koko Taylor is coming to the Door Community Auditorium on Sunday August 12. This has the promise of being a great blues show. Koko is knows world wide as the Queen of the Blues and has sung with most of the blues greats. On her second album, The Earthshaker (Alligator Records) the liner notes boast that she is, “The hardest-rocking, grittiest, roughest, toughest blues woman around. A voice so powerful it can shake the walls of a smoke-filled tavern. A voice with a razor edge that can cut through a shouting, dancing crowd. A voice honed by twelve years on the road, singing everywhere from the tiniest small town bars to giant outdoor festivals. A voice that has devastated audiences on five European tours. A voice that injects every note with that joyous, searing Chicago raunch.”
Koko has seven albums for Alligator Records, has had five Grammy nominations and won a Grammy in 1984. She’s been honored with 19 W.C. Handy Awards for blues excellence. She was further awarded the Chicagoan of the Year (1998) and inducted into the Blues Foundation’s Blues Hall of Fame (1999). Her latest album, Royal Blue, (Alligator Records), is her first release in seven year, and does not disappoint!
I spoke with Koko over the phone during the week before her Door County concert.
RK (Roger Kuhns): “What is blues to you?”
KT (Koko Taylor): “It’s like therapy for people, a meaning that comes from the heart, I’m not just singing words, I’m saying something! Every lyric is singing something or helping somebody touch somebody. Like you wonder about what makes you like a song – something in it touches me, you say, and I gotta go to the record shop and get it, that’s what it means to me – reaching out and helping someone. Fore instance, I had my last concert in Alaska and this lady comes up to me crying. I said to her, ‘What’s the matter?’ and she say, ‘You uplift me, you heal me.’ Those are the things I strive for in a song, all of this is the meaning of helping people. That’s how I design my singing – a therapy.”
Koko, was born Cora Walton, Sept. 28, 1935 where she grew up on a sharecropper’s farm outside of Memphis, TN. It was the most basic of existences, and her family (three brothers and two sisters) and they used pallets as beds in a shotgun shack. There was no running water or electricity. Koko and her family picked cotton to survive. During those early years she was given her nickname Koko because of her love for chocolate. Koko was orphaned by age eleven.
RK: “Now that you’re older, how has the music, the blues changed for you?”
KT: “Well, to me its just gotten better, like good whisky, you know, the older it is the better it is. By me being older, my singing hasn’t changed and I’ve not changed, but the it is better.”
RK: “Who are your greatest influences?”
KT: “Muddy Waters is number one! He sticks to me like a good piece of ribs. Something about him, about his singing just turned me on. He put something inside of me I could never forget about, almost like I described about my singing. Howlin’ Wolf, that howls all night long, he’s another one, just really turned me on. Just a good feeling. When I started singing, and thinkin’ ‘bout what I was going to do on this record I could only think about how Muddy and Howlin’ Wolf and Big Mamma Thorton would do it. Big Mama Thorton was a great blues singer and older woman singing, I’d be thinking Ball & Chain, she did that well. She was a great role model, same as Bessie Smith – I never met her but heard a lot of her music.”
RK: “What do performances mean to you; do they blur together or do you remember certain ones?”
KT: “Oh yeah, I can tell that maybe it’s because I’m in my older years or whatever, but the way people make me feel is important, like that I add a little flavor to the pot. Everything I do comes from the heart. Like the Blues Hotel, I can’t do the song unless people say, ‘Did you hear how she did that song?’ That touches my heart. Every time I walk on stage I want to touch someone’s heart, to make them feel better, I name my music, my blues a therapy for people.”
RK: “Do you have any advice for young performers?”
KT: “My advice to them is to do like I did, and I hope this is the right answer. First you gotta want to do what you’re doin’. It don’t turn out the same if your heart and soul ain’t into this. They ain’t gonna let nothing turn them around. If this is what you want to do you got to stick with it. The sun may shine to day, but tomorrow its gonna storm. Hang in there, its like a marriage, you got to hang in there for better for worse. And I’m just getting warmed up in the bull pen on that!”
During these early hard years Koko and her siblings developed a great love for music from the songs she heard in church and those heard on B.B. King’s daily show West Memphis King Biscuit Radio. Gospel was what her father wanted her to sing, but B.B. King and other greats of the day, such as Bessie Smith, Muddy Waters, Memphis Minnie, Sonny Boy Williamson, Big Mama Thornton and Howlin’ Wolf, had a powerful influence on Koko. So the Walton kids would play the blues with their homemade instruments; music was made from a guitar made out of bailing wire and nails and a corncob fife. In those days of struggling in day-to-day survival music kept their spirits from sinking too low, and Koko would listen to the blues over and over again. I asked her what she remembered about those younger years in Memphis.
KT: “From the moment I remember that we was livin’, and we was sharecroppers, my dad always told us we had to go to Church on Sundays, he didn’t allow us to listen to no radio. There was WDIA with Rufus Thomas and the blues were on that. My brothers and me would slip behind the house and turn the radio on, it run by batteries, we’d be behind that house and listen to the blues. Daddy wouldn’t let us do this. One of my brothers made a harmonica out of a corncob, and my other brother made a guitar using bailing wire. We’d git behind that house playing the blues, nobody but us kids. One day he found us, and oh boy that was a warm day for us! Oh boy, I never forget that. He always taught us you got to be obedient, but we wasn’t ‘cause we wanted to sing the blues. Little things like that they stick to my mind.”
There came a day when Koko got away from the deep south, and in 1953 at 18 years old moved to Chicago to be with her future husband Robert “Pop” Taylor (who died in 1989; Koko remarried to Hays Harris in 1997). Chicago was another world, and she found work for $5 a day as a domestic for North Shore families. It was better than the $0.50/day of the cotton fields
RK: “Are there any recent memories from the road that you’d like to talk about?”
KT: “I had an engagement in Los Angeles, California, at a little club thirty years ago. It was called the Tobacco Row. We gits there and before the performance there came a big storm and all the electricity was put out. I was talkin’ to my guitar player and said, ‘Too bad we can’t do our show.’ I said, ‘But if we had some acoustic guitars we could still do a show.’ One of the people heard me, and he jumped up and said I got an acoustic and I got one right down the street. He ran down the street and he got it. Another man jumped up too did the same thing, and soon we had all these instruments. My guitar player played acoustic guitar. I had my mouth, which is all I needed, and we did the whole show. It was something. The write up in the paper the next day said it was best performance we’d ever had. Yeah, it was not planned that way, it just happened. I’ll never forget that.”
In Chicago she sang in the clubs and performed with some of the great blues singers. It was during those years that her first break found her; in 1962 legendary disc jockey Big Bill Hill introduced her to arranger/ composer Willie Dixon. Dixon told her, “My God, I never heard a woman sing the blues like you sing the blues. There are lots of men singing the blues today, but not enough women. That’s what the world needs today, a woman with a voice like yours to sing the blues.” Jam sessions in Dixon’s basement at 52nd & Calument gave Koko the opportunity to hone her singing voice to that signature tone she now posseses: a heavy, accusatory alto that some called the female equivalent to the baritone growl of Howlin’ Wolf. Soon she had a recording contract with Chess Records and produced several singles and a couple albums with Dixon. She had a million-seller with Wang Dang Doodle in 1965; it was a big hit on black radio stations and opened opportunities throughout the South, including Dallas, St. Louis, Houston, Miami and back home in Memphis. European tours followed as her sound was discovered overseas.
RK: “How are you coping with the age-old problems in the industry and outside of it in a so-called man’s world?”
KT: “They call it a man’s world, and I believe it is, but from ‘day one’ when I started in my career I have not had no real problems. It’s been a little rough sometimes, but because I was a woman in a man’s world it was with me kinda like I was something like a little innocent pet rabbit. That’s the way I look at it. Now I’m out there with all these lions, so now I got to behave big like they is, I got to speak up for myself. I got to let them know here is a woman who can do the same thing they can: sing the blues. I treat them with respect and demand that from them. It’s been that way all through the years, even my band right today I treat them with respect and they respect me.”
RK: “Did the lean years worry you? How did you cope with them?”
KT: “Oh yes, at that time, I never really thought about it. The only thing I knew at that time was what was going on around me at that time. I thought it was great then, I didn’t have nothing. None of my family didn’t have nothing. All I knew of work was to pick cotton. We’d get paid but it wasn’t about nothing. Can’t think too hard about something you don’t know about. I was born in poverty and we was poor. I thank god for what I have now and my voice.”
During the 1970s, Taylor increased her notoriety as a premier female blues singer. This included getting out of the South Side to perform in blues clubs in Chicago’s north side. Her largest audience was found at the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival in 1972, and it was there that her future producer Bruce Iglauer. Atlantic Records recorded the festival and released a live album, giving Koko national recognition. By 1975, Taylor signed with a new Chicago blues label called Alligator Records, owned by Iglauer. When Iglauer finally called her she said to him, “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!” Koko’s career really started to take off after that.
RK: “Are your songs autobiographical?”
KT: “It’s nothing I’m singing about that I experienced. Nothing some one did to me. But the blues music in general is made on hard times, depression, and slavery, just being black. Nothing else people knowd about saying, about singing. Its just like it’s been all the years. On Ernestine, first thing I say is like I’m talking to someone really named Ernestine… ‘Ernestine you better leave my man alone…’ Do I really know some woman named Ernestine? Well I gotta sing it like I do. The shoe fits somebody’s feet. Every song must relate to somebody.”
Her first album for Alligator, I Got What It Takes (AL 4706), was nominated for a Grammy. The liner notes on that first album describe her voice as sounding like: “gravel through a swamp, out-funking frogs and crawdads. A panther's squall through black night can't scare her. She already knows how it sounds.” Of her energy it says, “She's D.C. Direct current. High voltage energy -- no hesitation at all to put you right down in blues alley. There's total involvement, total commitment to the truth of the blues.” And Koko herself says, “I have to do what I know best -- and what I know best is the blues...to be different from other female singers -- and to stay where I think I belong, and that is in the real blues bag. I just go ahead and do what I'm doing -- straightforward blues."
RK: “Listening to you sing – I hear every fiber of your being in the songs, it gets me in my heart – how do you do that?”
KT: “Well, as the years get along, my voice gets stronger, I’ve always sung from the heart, oh yeah. It’s how you sing it. Yeah, (for example) now I turn right around, now I want to do something that’s kinda jolly, get up and dance, like on ‘Somebody Bring Me Some Water’ lyrics. They’re same as Ernestine, but the melody picks you up. See, blues music comes in all types of fashion, some sing it this way, some the other. The bottom line the is its the blues.”
RK: “Tell me about your song writing.”
KT: “Writing songs – it’s a feeling, you just sit down and you come up with ideas, like putting words and ideas together, but at the same time when putting words and ideas together, they gotta rhyme, they gotta make sense; gotta tell a story. Like you telling a story like ‘Little Red Ridinghood’. You gotta tell why she running thru the woods, and what happened when she got there, all of that. Tell a story; same thing when you write a song. On Royal Blue, my song ‘Don’t Let Me Catch You (With Your Drawers Down)’, yeah that line – don’t let me catch you - came to my mind. Now I gotta tell you why you don’t want me to catch you, and what’s going to happen to you when I do. Hey, your drawers ain’t supposed to be down, if you ain’t in the bathroom them drawers ain’t supposed to be down!”
RK: “You’ve been doing blues all your life, could you ever see yourself doing anything else?”
KT: “I’ve been singing so long, so many years, but I am planning something else, but I’m not going to stop singing. I want to found a Koko Foundation, this is designed for our poor, unfortunate musicians and entertainers. There have been so many musicians that passed away that were so poor that the families didn’t have money to bury them. There are so many musicians in the hospitals with no one to even bring them flowers. I’d like to say, ‘I’ll pay a months rent for you,’ to do something for these less fortunate people. My thing is to help others. If you don’t help nobody, nobody helps you. If your hand is so tight nothing can come out of it, then nothin’ is goin’ to go in it too. Gotta do what the good Lord tells us, and we should help people.”
Koko is the grandmother of two, and her daughter Joyce “Cookie” Threatt helps run Koko’s nightclub in Chicago (Koko Taylor’s Celebrity at 1233 S. Wabash), which opened November 2000. Building her club is a 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.
RK: “Tell me about your club; what does it offer to Chicago?”
KT: “Lot of young ones coming in for just a chance to get on stage. A lot of youngsters come in and ask me questions like you and I are talking. You gotta have it in your heart, that’s what I tell them.”
Don’t miss Koko at the Auditorium on Sunday night
(for tickets: (920) 868-2590)
Koko Taylor discography on Alligator records:
Royal Blue (2001)
Forces of Nature (1993; ALCD 4817)
Jump For Joy (ALCD 4748)
Live From Chicago – An Audience with The Queen (1987; ALCD 4754)
Queen of the Blues (ALCD 4740)
From The Heart of a Woman (ALCD 4724)
The Earthshaker (ALCD 4711)
I Got What It Takes (ALCD 4706).
Koko Taylor
Alligator Records (www.alligatorrecords.com) and
(www.bcreativeinc.com) and www.publicity@allig.com
and (773) 973-7736
