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Koko Taylor has died.

I know this happened several days ago but it has taken me this long to get my thoughts together. I have been a fan of hers for years. Never a fanatic but a fan nonetheless, I have several albums of hers and they always evoke memories beyond the music. I have two Koko Taylor stories that turn her music into something personal.

Many years ago...I must have been 5 or 6, my family was visiting my paternal grandparents in a far off country called East Texas. I don't know why my grandparents always added East to their state affiliation but I have a feeling that they felt a certain placeness pride and would not want someone to think that they were from some vulgar part of the state...Apologies to any Texans reading this...

My fathers brothers and sisters, all being teenagers at this time were always sneaking off to the pond that was on my grandparents property...Mostly to talk about the Beatles, boyfriends and girlfriends...and also to smoke muscadine vines when they could not sneak smokes from my grandmother. On one occasion I noticed (being a precocious and imitative child) that their speech was punctuated by a phrase I had never heard and thought sounded alien to everything that public school had so far tried to teach me...The phrase was WANG, DANG, DOODLE...Imagine 3 teenagers sitting around talking, smoking, laughing and occasionally blurting out that phrase. I was entranced...and they laughed even harder when I gave it a whirl upon my young tongue...

Now good things must always come to and end...One day thereafter, when I was feeling particularly precocious in the presence of my adult relations, I let loose with the phrase that had caused my uncle and aunts such humorous pleasure. Well, my mother was none too pleased and whisked me off to the bedroom before I could gauge the rest of the family's response...I think she knew that I had heard it from the older kids since she stayed her hand that was so fond of corporal punishment...I was merely instructed that I was never to repeat those words...in that order...within earshot of anyone that might care...meaning every adult on the face of the earth. I knew she was serious by the pressure that her clenched hand was exerting upon my small forearm while she was telling me this...

Flash forward a day or so now...My grandfather is driving to Shreveport, a city in another far off country east of east.. He has volunteered to take me with him in his huge Buick that always smelled of plastic upholstery covers...As we sat in the car, the garage door going up and the faint smell of car exhaust in a closed space (Ahhhhh...still one of my favorite smells) permeating the air, the radio played a song whose chorus was the very words that I was never to speak again...The look on my face made my grandfather break out laughing...he was generally a humorless sort...but he turned the radio up and backed the car out of the driveway quickly, lest my mother or grandmother be in earshot...

To this day, that song makes me think of my grandfather, his huge plastic smelling car, exhaust fumes and road trips to exotic places east of east...

That song was also my gateway drug to the Blues...I started listening to them in earnest when I was about 10... I was living in Southern California and there were a couple of radio stations playing Koko Taylor, Muddy Waters, B.B. King and the like...

Flash forward about 25 years...I found out that Koko Taylor was playing at a small club while I was in San Diego during my Navy years...It was one of those clubs where you just show up, pay with cash and they promise to squeeze you in...Being tall, I was not worried about having to stand at the back of the room. I got seated just as Koko was starting her first number. Someone brought me a barstool and I sat at the back of the room...just as I had planned. After her third number, she was talking to the audience about her next song and she suddenly pointed at me way in the back and said something about why wasn't the white boy sitting down?..Did I have somewhere to go???...Things like that...the audience chuckled...Then the bartender picked up a microphone and explained to her that I WAS sitting down...Now the audience roared..and she put her hand over her mouth as she laughed. Later, she came back and shook my hand while commenting on how tall I am...I didn't have time to tell her the story about Wang Dang Doodle...But having written it here, she can peruse it at her leisure...

Thanks for all the wonderful memories Koko..