Barry Lee Pearson’s interview with Koko Taylor
By Dr. Barry Lee Pearson
Koko Taylor (1928-2009) was born Cora Anna Walton in Bartlett, Tennessee. She grew up in a large sharecropping family singing in the Baptist church and listening to blues on local radio and on Beale Street in Memphis. Moving to Chicago at age 18, she and her husband Pops Taylor were mainstays sitting in at black clubs where she was discovered and later mentored by songwriter producer Willie Dixon, who took her to Chess Records. In 1965 she scored a major hit with a Dixon composition, “Wang Dang Doodle.” Moving to Alligator Records in the 1970s, she quickly became a dominant force on the blues scene at home and abroad, recording and touring, and was consistently being named best female blues vocalist through the ‘70s and ‘80s. This interview took place in a Baltimore Comfort Inn, April 29, 1973.
“When I was growing up, my family was very religious. They was into gospel. And of course I was young and I grew up singing gospel because my dad said everybody in his household had to go to church on Sunday, and we did. So I grew up singing in a little Baptist church along with my sisters and brothers. And of course on weekdays we would listen to the blues on the radio. And we would sing the blues amongst ourselves. This was for our own enjoyment. So the bottom line was we would sing gospel on Sunday and blues on Monday.
So I cut my eyetooth singing gospel in the church. That was my main choice. But my second choice was to make sure I would listen to the blues. And then I would get experience singing the blues at home. We had this little shotgun house and of course I grew up on what we call a sharecroppers cotton farm. And every day we’d come home from the field, me and my sisters and brothers, and we’d go behind our little shotgun house and we’d have jam sessions. And like I said before, my brothers and myself and others, we couldn’t afford electric guitars and things, so my older brother took some hay baling wire and wrapped it onto some nails that he had driven in the house. And my younger brother made himself a harmonica out of a corn cob. And of course I didn’t have no mic, my mouth was my microphone. So we would get back there and we played and jam and have a good time.
You know as the years passed on, I was getting bigger and bigger and older and older and more into blues. I would listen to the radio every day. And the first time, when I really started paying attention to the blues a lot, I was listening to Rufus Thomas on WDIA out of Memphis. He was playing blues and he was playing this record by Memphis Minnie called “Me and My Chauffer Blues” and on the other side of that record was “Black Rat Blues” (swing). And then that kind of really stuck to me. He used to play Bessie Smith, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williams[on] – people like that, you know. It gave me a lot of attention to the blues. Also, BB King was a deejay over in West Memphis, Arkansas during the same time. He would come on every day playing the blues. I think it was 15 minutes a day, advertising “Pepticon sure is good” – you “can get it anywhere in your neighborhood.” So this is how I know about the blues. I listened to Big Mama Thornton. I used to like to listen to her. Muddy Waters was my biggest, my first, inspiration – Howlin’ Wolf, Bessie Smith, Sonny Boy Williamson and Robert Nighthawk – I can’t leave him out. I remember I was very young listening to Robert Nighthawk on that slide guitar. I thought it was a real neat sound.
I just liked them all. They was a lot of inspiration to me, but number one, Muddy Waters. He was the one person that always I always listened to and he turned me on. I liked other people a lot but something about Muddy Waters, it would like stick to my ribs. (Laughs)
Out in the country people had house parties. The house parties was just like a club, you know, and during those times thy didn’t have a whole lot of electric guitars, bands, and all that stuff. It wasn’t no band, it was just whoever could play and wanted to play. That’s who would, and they would have picnics and that was during the day like on Saturdays. Somebody in the country would have a big picnic and everybody all over far and near would come to that picnic, everybody who lived there and everybody had a good time. And you had children over on one side of the field, you know, they over there dancing and singing and having a good time. Over in the other corner somebody was selling moonshine, you know, if you don’t know what moonshine is, you talking about white whiskey that they homemade. So this is what went on.
When I was a youngster growing up down in Memphis, Tennessee – that’s where I was born and raised – every Saturday for people like myself, every Saturday they had a bus that would pick anybody up. I think it cost like a quarter to ride the bus from the country, because that’s where I lived, outside of Memphis. In a little town called Bartlett. And we’d ride that bus into Memphis, into the city down Beale Street. Now, down Beale Street was where it was happening with the theaters, the streets full of people, the park full of people and on Beale Street. And we would go down there and listen to whoever was there. They would be playing the guitar, singing the blues and somebody playing drums. So, I mean those days, those was good days, good times. That was the only enjoyment or entertainment that we had. It wasn’t no such thing as going to clubs or, you know, or fans listening to bands, like we doing today.
Then I went to Chicago with my boyfriend which turned out to be my husband. His name is Robert Taylor, but everybody around Chicago knew him as Pops Taylor. After we got to Chicago, because I still loved the blues, singing the blues, listening to the blues, I realized a lot of people that I had been listening to on the radio in Memphis was right in Chicago – Howlin’ Wolf, Jimmy Reed, and Sonny Boy Williamson, and all those folks, you know. We started, the first thing we did when we got to Chicago was to find work. My husband was lucky enough to find a job at Wilson Packing Company, which was a slaughterhouse for cows and stuff like that. I was lucky. I got a job working for a rich family, a rich white family up on Chicago’s North Shore, suburbs called Wilmette Winnetka, Glencoe – and all up there I got a job working for these people. And things were going real good.
Weekends, when we both was off, we would go to these different clubs and the guys got to where they’d know me from coming around on weekends and my husband would tell them, “Well, my wife she sings. She likes to sing.” In the meantime, my husband played guitar also. Pops would play his guitar at home sitting in the house and we’d make up songs, you know, pretend they were songs. We just would sing them and he’d be playing just me and him. So on weekends, he’d let them know, “My wife loves to sing.” And they say: “Come on up” and you can do a song for us. And it got to where it was a regular thing. Every weekend I would sit in with different bands -Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Jimmy Reed, J.B. Lenoir and all those people so it just kept up and up and on and on and on.
So they was having this big affair at a club in Chicago was called Sylvia’s, and anyway, we attended that affair. So what the affair was, all the other bands and people and everybody came. It was like a jam session. It was like whoever wanted to go up and sing, play music, shoot marbles or whatever, they would go up and do it. So I happened to be one of the people that went up to sing. And when I finished that particular day, this man walks up to me and introduced himself as Willie Dixon. And he says, “My God,” he say, “I ain’t heard a woman sing the blues like you sing the blues before.” He says, “You know we got a lot of men out here today that’s singing the blues, but not enough women. We don’t have no women singing the blues.” You know, he said, “That’s what the world needs today, a woman like you singing the blues.”
And he asked me was I recording for anybody, was I under contract with anybody. Of course at that time I didn’t even know the meaning of the word “recording,” because I had never heard or talked about recording or knew anything about it, or contracts. And I didn’t even know what he was talking about because I had just left the country I didn’t know nothing about no recording. I was just singing for my own enjoyment. So I knew singing and that was it. And as far as recording, well that was like a dream that I never dreamed of that come true. So anyway he says to me that he would like to take me down to Chess Records, which was located in Chicago, Twenty-First Street. And he would like to record me. And he said, “Would you be interested in that?”
And my husband answered the question and he said, “Yeah, she’d like that.” So that’s what he did, he carried me down and he got hooked up with Chess. Of coursem he turned out to be a, what they call music arranger, writer and all that stuff for Chess Records. So Willie Dixon wrote my first song, “I’ve Got What it Takes.” So he took me down there and that’s how I got my first break, that’s how I got my first recording on Chess Records, through WillieDixon right there in Chicago. That’s what started the ball to rolling.
Anyway, as the time went by, Dixon kept writing, kept presenting me with songs and things like that. And after a while he called me one night, this was, we talking about a year later, he calls me in the middle of the night. He says, “Koko, I just finished writing a song and we need to start working on it right away whiles it’s hot in my mind.”
And I say, “Well, what song is this that can’t wait until tomorrow? It’s 12 o’clock at night and I’m in the bed sleeping.”
He says, “Wang Dang Doodle.” I saym “That’s the most silliest thing I most ever heard of,” you know, “Wang Dang Doodle,” and I said, “Look, I’ll see you tomorrow.” He said, “No, we got to do it tonight. We got to get started tonight. We got to pick the chicken while the water’s hot.” (Laughs) So that’s what we did. I went over to his house and we started picking the chicken, which means we start working on this tune. And so we started working on “Wang Dang Doodle.” I recorded “Wang Dang Doodle.” When they told me it was at the top of the charts, I couldn’t believe it. I said, “No, it couldn’t be.” Everybody’s making a mistake. They must be talking about Nat King Cole or BB King or somebody, but not Koko Taylor. But, anyway, “Wang Dang Doodle”went to the top of the charts and sold a million copies, which was my biggest seller so far.
Now, during these years that we talking about it was only black clubs, black audiences, but as the years went by they start opening up the blues on Chicago’s Northside. There was a club up on North Lincoln called the Wise Fools Pub. That was the first club that opened up for blues. I would work up there singing the blues on weekends. Friday night. Saturday night. Then, later on, there was another club, the Kingston Mines opened up for blues. Now we talking white clubs in white neighborhoods. Later on there was another club called Buddy Mulligan’s, which was way up on North Broadway. And so we could tell things were changing just a little bit. Course we’d go up there on weekends to different clubs and sing the blues. And it meant a lot because it meant that we had more of a variety of places to go and work. And that’s when I started changing over like to white audiences, you know, when I started working these clubs in Chicago.
And then I was doing a lot of big festivals which was mainly white audiences, like in 1972 or 1971, there was a big festival in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I did that festival. And then I went to Europe in 1967 and did a lot of big festivals. So that was the beginning of my career as far as changing the audience over from black to white. And ever since, over the years, ever since blues has become more popular and more famous all over the world. And now today the blues right now is very popular everywhere. All over the world – Europe, Japan, Australia. I’m getting ready now to do a tour in Israel and Australia next month in July. What can I say, all the places I’m going today, the things that I’m doing, it’s just much more popular.
After Chess, I signed with Bruce Iglauer’s Alligator Records and he’s helped promote the blues. But as far as writing songs, Willie Dixon was the one that caused me to start writing, because when he told me to write a song I told him I had never did that before in my life and that I could not do it. I didn’t know the first step about writing a song. He said:
“All you got to do is stop and thinkg about everyday life.” He say, “You start putting words together, the rhymes. It got to make sense.” He says,” as long as they make sense,” he says, “you can do it.”
And that’s what I did. And I’m doing that today in between my work on the road, which is really hard to do, but I’m doing it. I’m working on an album also. I have already finished ten tunes on Alligator for this new album that’s coming out. And I got four more songs to go, because Bruce said for a CD you have to put more songs than you do on a regular record. So that means more work. So I got these other four songs that I’m working on now that I got to put on there as soon as I have some time at home. I wrote “Jump for Joy,” the title song, and another one called “Can’t Let Go,” “Stop Watching Your Enemies,” and another one called “I’m Tired of That.” I did those four. And for this new album that’s coming out, I wrote the song called “Let’s Put the Pot On,” another one called “I’m Spellbound,” and the other one is called “I’m Your 63-year-old Mama.” Hopefully it will be an album that people can enjoy listening to. On that same album, I’ve also done Big Mama Thornton’s and Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog.” Also there’s a rock tune, it was rock when I heard it but it’s blues now – I just recorded, it’s called “Doctor, Doctor Give me the News, I got a Bad Case of Loving You.” So you know what can I say. It’s just an album that I hope will be a good one.
I was in a movie. David Lynch called up Alligator Records and he said that he needed a woman blues singer to do this tiny part in his movie, “Wild at Heart.” Alligator asks him, “Well, did you have anybody in mind?” And he said, “Of course, Koko Taylor, that’s why we called Alligator Records.”
And that’s how I got in “Wild at Heart.” It was very, very neat. I can’t express how happy that made me. I had never been in a movie before. I was excited, glad to do it. It was an honor when they asked me to do that part. And I’m waiting for him to pick up the phone, call again, you know, whenever, I’ll be ready. (Laughs)
That song that I did was a song was wrote by David Lynch which was the promoter, producer of the film. He wrote this song and of course he told me, demonstrated how he wanted it sung, how he wanted it to sound, and all this stuff. You know I’m standing at a bar, singing “I Fell for You Baby Like a Bomb,” while these peoples are romancing and dancing in the club, getting close together and having a good time.
The greatest thing that happened to me was when I had the opportunity to be invited by Lee Atwater to come to Washington, D.C. and sing the blues on that big blues festival they had for George Bush and the First Lady. Well, that day that I sang the blues to the president and had a chance to meet and shake hands with Mrs. Barbara Bush, to me that was one of the great moments in my career because it’s not every day that people sing the blues to the president for his first day in office. I forget what you call it, this festival had so many people. He had Willie Dixon, Albert Collins, Stevie Ray Vaughn, myself, and on and on. Just with gobs of people on the show but most of all I was there and I was very happy and honored to be a part of that show. And now one other time that was very special was when I walked across the stage in Los Angeles and was presented with the Grammy Award. I think it was 1985. It’s not every day that blues entertainers receive a Grammy Award.
Everybody has their own style, meaning I wouldn’t want to sound like Big Mama and of course Big Mama wouldn’t have wanted to sound like me, and this is how everybody identifies everybody’s style because they have this little something special that they identify them by, you know, like you can hear somebody singing on the radio, you don’t see them, but the sound of their voice, you can pinpoint it and say, “Oh, that’s Etta James, that’s Aretha Franklin, or that’s Koko Taylor.” And it’s because of that style. And the difference in my style then, say, Big Mama Thornton. I mean the real difference is you know like a lot of my stuff I do is maybe I have more electrical instruments, more modern sound that she might have not had in some of her music. Not that her music wasn’t great, because I thought she was a great singer and I loved all her music. I used to do one of her tunes, “You Ain’t Nothin’ But a Hound Dog.” I used to do that. And sometimes now I do “Ball and Chain.” I thought she was a great woman, a great blues singer.
I do a lot of upbeat dance tunes too: “Hey Bartender,” “Beer Bottle Boogie,” “Hey Baby.” Those are what you call party tunes, party blues tunes. So I try to mix them all up together. This means I’m trying to reach out to a lot of people to please a lot of people.
Like a lot of people that don’t really have the experience and know and are used to listening to blues, they think they describe blues in their mind as old, slow, drawn-out depressing music, you know. You hear a lot of people say, “No, I don’t like blues because it’s too depressing.” I’m sure you’ve heard folks say that. But you see my blues is not depressing, and my blues is designed to make people look up, look forward, and not look back. A lot of people come up to me after a concert and say: “You know that song you did, ‘You Can Have my Husband’ – aw, it just made my day.” It takes their mind off their problem if it’s nothing but couple hours while they’re in a bar or club or concert listening to me sing the blues. Because this is how my show, my concerts are set up, to make people feel good and not feel sad. They used to call the blues the devil’s music, but I don’t think they’re calling it the devil’s music today. I think they’re calling it some of the best music that you most ever listened to, because you know blues has always been behind every other type of music and, well, it still is but it’s coming out and beginning to get the recognition it deserves. And that’s long overdue. So talking about blues I just call it fine music.
I started out singing gospel in church, but I’m not singing gospel today. I love gospel today. And once in a while I get to go to church. This is not often, but I don’t sing whiles I’m there, because I don’t really prefer mixing blues with gospel. But to listen to other people sing it while I’m in church, I do that and I enjoy it. But that’s as far as it goes.
When I was real young my parents didn’t want me to sing blues, but today my family all of them is really appreciative and real honored to have me in the family, and standing out for the blues and for them too.
It’s not really difficult for me. But it’s not easy either. It’s something that you have to really want to do, something you have to enjoy doing now with me. I enjoy doing what I’m doing not because it’s easy – because it’s not easy being out here on the road riding up and down highway, thousands of miles at a time, eating out of restaurants like I’m sitting here hungry now and we got to go find a restaurant somewhere and get something to eat. And sleeping in different beds in different hotels every day all over the world, you know. I mean that’s not easy at all, but it’s what I love doing. I enjoy this. So that makes it become more easier for me. But it’s not because it’s an easy task. It’s not harder because I’m a woman, it’s just hard, period.
But being a woman, I have more things to contend with than men because a lot of times I have to try to change my clothes and glitter and try to look especially nice because I am a woman. Men can walk up on the stage with their blue jeans, what they done traveled in all day. I can’t do that. So it makes it harder so far as people treating me different. I get along fine. I do.
And I think it’s very important that the blues stay alive. And one thing I can say about the blues today is it’s more alive today than it has ever been over the past years. And getting more and more popular every day as the time go by. and I’m not talking about just popular for the older people, and I’m not just talking about popular for the young. I’m talking about the blues has become popular for everybody – black and white, young and old. And it’s a lot of young people coming up who want to make a career singing and I would just say to them that it doesn’t come easy. It’s something that you got to hang in there with, take the bitter with the sweet. It’s like a marriage, for better or for worse. It just don’t happen overnight. It’s hard work. But for me, as long as I got my health and strength, I will be keeping up the pace. I will be doing what I enjoy doing most of all and that’s singing the blues.
The blues is always and has always been in the background. The blues has never received the recognition that I feel it deserves like other music. And as you know the blues has always been like the last, the tail end of everybody’s music list. You hear people say: “Well, so and so got a blues program that comes on two hours every week, every Saturday night, or every Sunday morning, on this or that – whereas you can turn the radio on 24 hours a day and listen to rock, pop, jazz, soul, or whatever – anything but blues. So for that reason it has never gotten the recognition that other music (has). So I would say it’s hidden to certain persons.
I believe if they tune in on the blues and blues get more airplay on the radio, like other music, I believe the people would like it and go for it and appreciate hearing it. But it’s like anything else. Most people cater to what’s being advertised. You know, if you advertise chicken and steak, that’s what everybody is going to buy when neck bones is just as good.”
Dr. Barry Lee Pearson, Professor in the English Department at the University of Maryland stands as the most steadfast supporter of the local acoustic blues scene in the greater Washington, D.C., area and beyond. As a musician, author, college lecturer, folklorist, and personal friend to the musicians, he has been the voice of this regional blues scene.