While the bizarre circumstances surrounding David Carradine’s death trump all other celebrity deaths this week, us Memphians have our own mourning to do:
Yesterday, 80-year old blues great Koko Taylor died in Chicago, less than a month after she appeared at the Blues Music Awards here in Memphis to collect her 29th BMA and perform her signature, million-selling hit single, “Wang Dang Doodle.”
Born the daughter of a Shelby County sharecropper, Cora “Koko” Walton departed Memphis for Chicago in 1952 with her future husband, Robert “Pops” Taylor, in tow, and never looked back. By the mid-1960s, Taylor, an amateur performer who supported her family by cleaning houses, had ensconced herself in the Chess Records family — Willie Dixon was her producer, Buddy Guy served as her guitarist, and “Wang Dang Doodle” was mined from Howlin’ Wolf’s catalog. In more recent years, Taylor became one of the benchmark artists on the Chicago-based Alligator Records. Eight of her last 9 recordings, including 2007’s Old School, received Grammy nods. In 2004, Taylor received the National Heritage Fellowship Award from the National Endowment for the Arts, and, earlier this year, she performed at the Kennedy Center Honors.
Go here for a detailed obituary.
