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What an exit! Koko Taylor's funeral took place on Friday, June 12, the first night of the Chicago Blues Festival. Who could be more deserving of becoming the centerpiece of the largest Blues festival in the world in the city she called home for 56 years. The Queen of the Blues brought a woman's heart and love to a man's game. If there was a glass ceiling for female Blues singers, she broke through it with a style that was every bit as raw and real as her male mentors who electrified the Delta Blues sound.

Howlin' Wolf first recorded "Wang Dang Doodle," but it was Koko Taylor who made it a hit in 1966. With her upper body extending forward at a thirty-degree angle, her fist clutching the microphone, and her jaw opened wide, she turned writer Willie Dixon's vision of a Saturday-night union hall Blues jam on its ear. It was one thing for a male monolith from the Delta like Howlin' Wolf to sing about people who "romp and tromp till midnight" and "fuss and fight till daylight," but Koko was a lady in every sense of the word. In fact, when Willie Dixon first asked her to record the song that would earn her the label Queen of the Blues, she wasn't at all sure she could buy into the song.

"I didn't like it at the time," she told me in 1990, "because it had all them weird names in there. To me, it was like talkin' about people. You know, pinpointing people like 'Butcher-Knife-toting Annie,' 'Fast-talking Fannie,' and all that stuff. I said, 'Where did you come up with all these people from? Why do you want me to sing a song like that? I don't wanna do that one. I'd rather do another one.' He said, 'Koko, this is a good song.  If you do this tune, the people gonna like it.'"

Koko was rubbing shoulders with Chicago's top Blues artists and she felt she was in the middle of a Cinderella story. "It was like a dream. It never happened. But this did happen, and [Willie Dixon] told me he was an A&R man for this company, Chess Recording Company, and he would like to have me down for an interview with Leonard Chess and see what they thought about it because he was sure they would agree with him that I had the greatest voice in the world for Blues singing."

Still, Koko just didn't like "Wang Dang Doodle," and she didn't like how Willie Dixon was working her. She told me in 1998, "[I gave Willie Dixon] a lot of trouble [when he called and asked me to work on "Wang Dang Doodle"]. First of all, it was in the middle of the night [laughs]. It was in the middle of the night, and I'm working at that particular time. I'm doing what we call domestic work up on Chicago's North Side, and I had to go to work the next morning and to stay up practically all night with him working on this song? I thought it was ridiculous. I went down there and we got to working on that, and he says to me, 'Look, we got to pick the chicken while the water's hot!'"

That picked chicken was Chess Records' last Blues hurrah. They were selling Rock and Soul with acts like Rotary Connection and The Dells, but "Wang Dang Doodle" was the last Blues hit for a company built on the songs of Koko's mentors Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters. "Wang Dang Doodle" reputedly sold more than a million copies for a label that was searching for a new market among white Folk music fans in 1966. This was hardly "Folk music," at least not the way it was defined in 1966. Recorded on Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, 1965, the single featured a who's who of the Chess session musicians: Buddy Guy and Johnny "Twist" Williams on guitars, Fred Below on drums, Jack Meyers on bass, Gene "Daddy G" Barge on sax and the Chess A&R majordomo Willie Dixon himself on vocals with Koko.  

By 1969, the independent Chess label was sold off, and Koko was left with little more than a memory of her one hit and two albums that sold poorly. "Oh, no. I never got [my proper royalties from Chess]," she said in 1981, almost laughing at the absurdity of the mere suggestion. "I didn't know what the word 'royalty' meant. With the bad and the good, I just hung on in there. It wasn't the receiving of a lot of money. That was the thing with me, it was because I loved what I was singing."

Forty-two years after hitting the charts with "Wang Dang Doodle," Koko Taylor had long since made peace with that song's meaning to her career and her moral and religious beliefs. "I know the difference from Blues music and Gospel music," she told me in 2007. "So, I don't mix the two together. They don't go together at all. That's like mixing the devil with God, and you can't do that. There's nothing wrong with singing "Wang Dang Doodle." I don't find nothing wrong with it at all, and I find the public enjoys what I'm singing and everything. So, yeah, I enjoy singing it."

A lot of records and a lot of road miles marked Koko Taylor's life after "Wang Dang Doodle." Bruce Iglauer, head of the fledgling Alligator Records, had seen on Koko when she regularly guested with Mighty Joe Young at The Wise Fools Club and signed her. "It's a much smaller company," explained Koko. "It's what they do for the artists. Alligator really gets the recordings out there and tries to get them promoted and get 'em where the people hear 'em and buy 'em. A lot of recordings for Chess were never released. A lot of people didn't know about me other than 'Wang Dang Doodle' until I got with Alligator."

The title "Queen of the Blues" and one million-selling hit did not mean that life suddenly became easy for Koko. One of six children and an orphan at eleven, she lived in a shotgun shack with no running water or electricity and as a child picked cotton on a sharecropper's farm outside of Memphis. She and her husband-to-be Pops Taylor had moved to Chicago in 1952 with 35 cents and a box of Ritz Crackers.

Willie Dixon gave Koko her bachelor of arts in Bluesology by teaching her how to write and deliver a good blues song, but it was Bruce Iglauer who handed her an honorary master's degree in fine arts.  She released her first Alligator album, I Got What It Takes, in 1975. The title cut was a remake of the first single she ever put out on Chess Records. While that song and the majority of her Chess recordings were written by Willie Dixon, many of her Alligator LPs had three or four Koko originals on them with titles like "Voodoo Woman," "Can't Let Go," "Don't Let Me Catch You with Your Drawers Down," and "Hard Pill to Swallow."

"I had never wrote a song before in my life, and when he [Willie Dixon] told me about he wanted me to write this song, I says to him, 'I don't know nothin' 'bout writin' no songs.' So, he demonstrated to me all I gotta do is think about everyday, everyday surroundings. Just look over my shoulders, and you'll see something to write about. 'All I want you to do is whatever you say in your song has got to make sense. It got to tell a story, and it has to have a meaning.' He learnt me that."

None of her other Chess or Alligator recordings had the commercial impact of "Wang Dang Doodle," which she again recorded on The Earthshaker for Alligator in 1978, but six of her nine Alligator releases were nominated for a Grammy Award, even though her one Grammy win was in 1985 for Blues Explosion, a multi-artist release on Atlantic Records. Each of these albums was co-produced by Bruce Iglauer and, in addition to her regular band, featured guests who included Buddy Guy, B. B. King, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Bob Margolin, Keb' Mo', Pinetop Perkins, and Lonnie Brooks.

She had the title Queen of the Blues, but when I talked to her in 1998, she had come to realize that royalty, too, has its dues to pay. "It's nothin' easy to ride up and down the highway like when I came out where you at. Go from Chicago to New York, and I sure ain't getting' rich, ya know? And to pay all the dues and the struggles, drivin', sleepin' on a bus. You get where you're goin'. You've got a hotel from night after night. You're in a different hotel bed away from your family, your friends and again it ain't like you getting' a whole bunch of money. So, hey, you got to love what you doin'."

On the road more than nine months a year, the law of averages had caught up to her. In 1988, she suffered an accident when the band's van driven by her husband suffered an accident. He eventually died, and the incident almost took her out of the game. "Our van went off a mountain cliff right out of Chattanooga, Tennessee, called Swannee, and I ended up with three broken ribs, broken shoulder, and collar bone, and just banged up real good there. Thank God I came out of it brand new again," she told me in 1990, "and I'm just real thankful. I'm not having no problems now at all, and that's good."

"It was kinda rough, but I got my inspiration from just knowing this is what I like to do, and after my husband passed away, my music was the best thing happening for me. Just get back out here and do it, and it really helped me because it kept my mind occupied. It kept me from thinking about a lot of things I would have been thinking about, worrying about on a lot of stress. It just eased that a little."

Life's next big hurdle came in 2003 when she was operated on for gastrointestinal problems. "When she became ill in 2003 and had her surgery, she was on a ventilator," explained Iglauer. "She was on life support. The doctors were telling us not to have much hope, that it was not likely that she was ever going to be conscious again, much less be out of bed, much less singing or recording and basically we were on sort of a deathwatch, and Koko refused to die.

"She willed herself back to life against all odds and then willed herself back to singing, willed herself back to the stage, willed herself back to the recording studio. She had incredible strength, strength that came from all those years of living on personal and financial adversity, coming up the hardest way you could."

Koko seemed to gain new traction after her brush with death. Her last album, Old School, in 2007 was one of her finest and featured two Willie Dixon songs, "Young Fashioned Ways" and "Don't Go No Further." I saw her that year in Albany, New York, and she appeared frail, relying on the support of her devoted daughter Cookie, but four weeks before her passing in May of this year, she won her 29th Blues Music Award in Memphis and delivered a sparkling version of "Wang Dang Doodle" backed by the Mannish Boys.

"I'm real proud of myself and my fans," she told me in the basement of Petrillo Band Shell in 2007 during the Chicago Blues Festival. "It helped so much just to be out with my fans. It helped me not to be so depressed. It helped ease some of the pressure that I had on my mind behind losing my husband and things like that, but as far as putting everything into it, I was doing that all the time. I always did put all I had into a song, into a recording. When I'm on a bandstand, I put all I have into it, you know? So, it was really nuthin' new. It was like a valve released, a release valve."

Bessie Smith called herself  The Queen of the Blues in the 1920s. Artists like Billie Holiday, Big Mama Thornton, and Etta James gave women a high profile in the genre before Koko Taylor's arrival on the scene, but she walked into the lion's den where others feared to tread. She hung with the Chicago male hierarchy Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, and Howlin' Wolf. And when those Blues icons were struggling to keep an audience by rubbing shoulders with the British Blues rockers, she showed them that a woman could take their music back to its unadulterated roots, selling more copies of one single in 1966 than her mentors had even in Chess's heyday of the early 1950s. Not only was she a successful crossover taking the roots to the new audience on the North Side and the college crowd worldwide, but she did it with a personal dignity, family values, and a personality that said there was a place for women in this game.

Surrounded by Chicago survivors like Eddie Shaw and Jimmy Dawkins at the Chicago Blues Fest in 2007, she told me, "I'm here to please all of these people, and you can't please everybody, but we try, and that's what I do is try to reach out and please and make everybody feel good and enjoy what I'm out there doing. People walk up to me after I finish a show, a lot of people walk up to me and say, 'This is the first time I ever heard the Blues, but after listening to you tonight, I am a Blues fan. I didn't know I would enjoy it as much as I enjoyed you.' See, that means a lot to me. That means I have did a song that helps somebody. They go, 'Oh, that song you did, "I'd Rather Go Blind," it just made my day.' Well, they just made my day!

"The bottom line is I'm still hanging in there, looking forward, getting through with my CD, and looking forward to movin' on up, keep movin' on up till I reach the sky, and if I land in the cloud, I'm still happy." 

Don Wilcock is the editor of BluesWax. He has also written the authorized biography of Buddy Guy and was the recipient of the Keeping The Blues Alive Award for Journalism from The Blues Foundation last year. Don may be contacted at blueswax@visnat.com.

BluesWax is an electronic publication from Visionation.