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KoKo
June 5th, 2009A hurricane died this week.
Koko Taylor was nothing less than a growling storm of blues. Hailed as the Queen of the Blues, Koko possessed seemingly endless energy erupting from her paunchy Chicago blues body and soul. When performing you lived in fear that either she or the audience would explode in frenzied elation, like a revival tent gone horribly right.
I first caught Koko in Richmond, Virginia. Like many touring acts, her band first warmed up as the mixing board jockeys got the sound levels right. One and a half songs into the opening set, Koko sashayed onto the stage and smiled at the crowd like a hungry man grins at a steak dinner. She assaulted her microphone with one hand and belted out an opening lung full that caused her sound engineers and half the audience to wet themselves.
Cliché it may be, but Koko was a force of nature. Lighting barely contained in a half full bottle of Tennessee bourbon.
Aside from a voice of thunder in a cement mixer, Koko knew how to let near reckless abandon infect an audience. Unbridled, she could cause a crowd in venues small or large to lose their inhibitions. When a slick south side brother and a conservatively dressed middle class suburban woman jump simultaneously onto a table and dance like Saint Vitus had a lien on their souls, you knew Koko was singing.
Like many other road hardened blues masters, Koto merely got better with time. It is said that as one looks down the backside of life, they care less about what other people think and start exploring. Liberated from conformity’s prison, these folks begin mapping new territories. Johnny Cash’s final records on the American label fused country with Nine Inch Nails. Ray Wylie Hubbard has let swamp and Texas dust decorate his recent works.
Koko just became more Koko, which was unique to begin with. Concentrated and pure, she was the essence of herself and something that will never be duplicated.
