Finding joy in the blues

By EILEEN SCHULTE
Published October 15, 2005

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CLEARWATER - This time last year, Koko Taylor was feeling the blues rather than singing them.

Taylor had heart problems so severe she had to undergo surgery and was hospitalized for four months.

Now feeling better, she'll perform at 7 tonight at the 26th annual Clearwater Jazz Holiday at Coachman Park.

"I'm looking forward to coming there, making people happy with the blues," Taylor said by phone from her home in Chicago. "That's what it's all about."

Born Cora Walton, Taylor, 70, grew up poor on a sharecropper's farm in Tennessee.

Nicknamed Koko because she loved chocolate so much, she and her five brothers and sisters used to sing and play instruments made from bailing wire and nails.

But only one genre of music was allowed in the house.

"Our dad, he didn't want us to sing the blues," Taylor said. "He wanted us to sing gospel."

But when he wasn't around, they'd slip into the back yard and sing songs they heard on B.B. King's radio show, which was broadcast every day out of Memphis.

At 18, Taylor moved to Chicago's south side and got a job as a cleaning woman for a wealthy family.

During her time off, she'd visit blues clubs and sit in with the likes of Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy.

In 1965, her career took off with the hit Wang Dang Doodle.

She has been nominated for several Grammy Awards, and in 1997, she was named to the Blues Hall of Fame.

Right now, she's working on a new CD. She has already written nine of the 12 or so songs on the album, and said she should be in the studio recording it within the next three weeks.

"I'm still healing from (the heart attack)," Taylor said. "But I'm well enough to sing the blues."