KOKO TAYLOR

Even a year ago, Koko Taylor was known only by those who recalled her classic mid-’60’s rhythm and blues smash, “Wang Dang Doodle.” It’s not hard to tell why nearly everyone who heard that song had Koko’s name implanted front and center on their cerebrum. She sang it in the most distinctive voice we’d heard in years, a gravelly cross between Tina Turner and Howlin’ Wolf.

Koko’s first album (Koko Taylor, Chess LPS 532) brought her more of the attention she deserved. Almost stereotyped as a novelty artist because of “Wang Dang Doodle” and songs with a similar strain of bizarritude running through the lyrics, her album proved at last that she could handle any kind of blues or R&B material.

Peter Guralnick ran into Koko at Chess’ old Chicago offices, and his remembrance (recorded in Feel Like Goin’ Home, his brilliant blues and rockabilly book) told the sad, sordid tale. “On the day I arrive a pouty-looking Koko Taylor is waiting in the lobby too. She wears a fancy wig and a spangled dress, and she waits all day for someone to see her. She is a fine singer, one of the few female blues artists around, but it is said that she is here on her day off from work. She works as a maid.”

Significantly, there are only three other female artists featured on the Blues and Jazz Festival program: Sippi Wallace and Bonnie Raitt, and Lucille Spann (performing with Mighty Joe Young’s group; Koko, too, has played with Young in the past). Significantly, too, that is more female performers than ever before at an Ann Arbor Blues Festival.

Her voice, someone once noted, is what you always wanted those singers called Big Mama to sound like. Her material never really reaches very far from blues. In Koko’s own words, “I keep with those that sing the blues.”

Koko is 34 years old; she came to Chicago from Memphis, Tennessee. Her real name is Cora. “Koko was a nickname the kids called me back home \yhen I was little,” she told Living Blues magazine last winter. “They couldn’t say Cora, they started saying Koko, and they just kept it up, like a pet name. Even when I met my husband, dating, he’d call me Koko. So, when I started singing I asked him what name should I use on my records, and he said, use Koko.”

Like so many blues performers, Koko’s singing career began in church. Later her . attention turned to more popular music. “In later years,” she continued in the Living Blues article, “I started paying more attention to other different singers -Bobby Blue Bland, B.B. King, those were my favorites, I guess. As to female singers, well, I liked Memphis Minnie. I remember her records when I was quite small and Bessie Smith’s. But I got my interest and listened to Wolf, Muddy and Bland ...”

Though she came to Chicago in 1953 and almost immediately began singing in local clubs, she wasn’t recorded until a full decade later. Big Bill Hill, the famous Chicago disc jockey, took Koko in to meet Willie Dixon. After “Wang Dang Doodle,” her third attempt, struck gold, she was invited on a 1967 American Folk Blues Festival tour of Europe. Koko Taylor was not released until last year.

Koko is certainly the dark horse of the festival. She has never received the exposure she deserves and, once given it, it seems clear that her success can’t be delayed any longer. That archetypal voice may keep many of us awake all night.