Born Cora Mae Walton in Memphis, Tennessee, Koko started out singing gospel in her neighborhood church, but soon gravitated towards the blues. Though still a young girl, she found herself drawn towards the raw, low-down artists that B.B. King played on his Memphis radio show – folks like Sonny Boy Williamson, Howlin’ Wolf and Elmore James. By the age of eighteen, she’d moved north to Chicago, with the intention of carving a niche for herself in the Windy City’s competitive blues scene.

For ten years, Koko sang at nearly every corner bar on the South Side, sitting in with local luminaries whenever she got the chance. She began making records in 1963, but didn’t achieve any chart success until 1965, when legendary songwriter Willie Dixon took Koko to Chess Records; "Wang Dang Doodle," her first single for the label, sold over a million copies, and established her as the new Queen of the Blues.

Unlike Etta James, her closest possible competition, Koko has never been one for stylistic diversity; on record and on stage (where she’s usually backed by her band, The Blues Machine), she prefers to stick with her hard-driving, house-rocking sound. It’s a style that has served her well to this day – Force Of Nature, her most recent album, received the best reviews of her career. Her status as a Chicago legend was cemented on March 3, 1993, when Mayor Richard M. Daley proclaimed it "Koko Taylor Day" in the Windy City.

"Voodoo Woman," a track from her first album for Alligator Records, 1975’s I Got What It Takes, shows why the blues world holds Koko Taylor in such high esteem. Her voice is so raw and powerful that it’s almost frightening; voodoo or no voodoo, this is a woman you definitely don’t want to mess with.

-- Dan Epstein

Dan Epstein is a Los Angeles-based journalist and pop-culture historian whose work has appeared in L.A. Weekly, BAM, Raygun, Guitar World and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications. His first book, Twentieth Century Pop Culture, was published in 1999 by Carlton Books.