Happy birthday to KoKo Taylor, the Queen of the Blues. Born on September 28, 1928 as Cora Walton in Memphis to a sharecropper. Her mother died when she was only 11. At 24, she came to Chicago with her husband, Robert Pops Taylor where he encouraged her to sing with the band when they frequented blue clubs. Her rough, powerful voice caught the attention of Willie Dixon in 1962. He took her under his wing and secured her a contract with Chess Records and gave her a hit song. m.youtube/watch?v=_w6IY0v-0pA Which promptly sold a million copies. She has won more W.C. Handy awards then any female performer in history. In 1984, she won a grammy for her participatation in an Atlantic various artists blues compilation, Blues Explosion. In 1988 an auto accident left her with numerous broken bones and would end up taking her husband/managers life a few months later. She made a comeback appearance at Chicago Blues Festival and in 1990, made a cameo appearance in the David Lynch film, Wild At Heart. She remarried in 1996 to Hays Harris, a tavern owner. In 1998, she was named Chicagoan of the Year and the following year was added to the Blues Foundations Blues Hall of Fame. She also opened her own blues club that year in the Rush Street area called KoKo Taylors Chicago Blues. Early in 2000, while performing at her club she fainted and underwent a successful angioplasty to unclog her heart. She stopped performing for awhile but in the years before her death, she was doing an amazing 70 concerts a year. She died on June 9, 2009 from complications in surgery at the age of 80.
Posted on: Sun, 28 Sep 2014 20:25:36 +0000
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