Koko Taylor is the Queen of the Blues. She can hold her own with anyone and blow most of their drinks over and out the window with her powerful voice. I first heard her doing a duet with Ben E. King - "Help Each Other Romance" - which I still do live sometimes with David Sumrall and also did in my first band (Eveready) as a duet with Webb Wilder. Later I got several of her albums and got obsessed with her big voice booming out such songs as "Wang Dang Doodle" (a million seller for her), Queen Bee, and her rewrite of "Mannish Boy" - "I'm a Woman." "I'm a woman, I'm a rushing wind. I'm a woman, I can cut stone with a pin." Cool lyric.

I got to meet her in Chicago one time. I had gone up there from south Mississippi on the train for a wedding. My younger step-brother and I went over to a club called On Broadway to see Koko the night before the wedding at the Drake Hotel. We had someone picking us up after the show so we could imbibe of watermelon shots and work our way up to the stage and stand right in front of her highness herownself. She was amazing! Her band was amazing. The crowd was amazing. All ages, black and white, college students, punks, rockabilly cats, business men, and blues purists mixed peacefully together all pressing to the front to get close to Koko.

After the show I encountered her in the parking lot and got her autograph and told her how much I loved her music and what I fan I was. She was very sweet and supportive and suggested that we might do a show together one day.

That day came a few years later when The Commandos opened for her at Liberty Lunch in Austin. I had given to her a few months earlier at one of her shows at Antones a tape of a blues song that Phareaux and I had written. I was very brazen and naive pitching this song to her. Later I realized that she probably wouldn't even listen to it. At the Liberty Lunch show. We played our set and did the song, "Two Time," and she came out of her dressing room and stood there listening the whole time. When we finished she went back inside. I didn't get to talk with her that night, and the few times I ran into her subsequently I don't think she knew who I was, and I never brought it up. She has always been a Queen in my eyes and regal and kind - very kind to me as a fan.

It is kinda cool to think (and I can think this if I want to) that she *did* listen to our song, and she recognized it and came out on the stage when we played it.

Yay! Koko Tayor is the Queen of the blues. I have certainly put in some time *trying* to sound like her. I'll never get the texture and weight of her voice down, but I have surprised a few folks belting out the Wang Dang Doo, and they sometimes ask if I'm a Janis Joplin fan. I am, of course, but I'm *trying* to sound like Koko.