Queen of the Blues

Posted by Chris Clarke on June 4, 2009

Koko Taylor died yesterday.

I had the privilege to see her perform a few times while I lived in Buffalo. Whatever the flaws in my old hometown that drove me out West, Buffalo was a fine place for music. There were big venues where the headliner bands would play, the football stadium and the War Memorial Auditorium and such, but I never went to any of those. The music I thought was worth seeing was all in the little clubs, and by “clubs” I mean bars, little funky old unsafe firetrap neighborhood bars, where a back room would have a rough stage of plywood and linoleum and cheap beer and smoke stained vinyl red and white covers on the rickety tables jammed together too closely to walk between them, and it was in places like that where I saw Koko Taylor perform in the late 1970s and early 1980s in Buffalo, crowd crammed so close to the band that we were pretty much all dancing together.

The first time I saw her sing I had no idea who she was. That changed about six bars into the first song.

This is her standard, which a lot of people are linking to this week. You should watch it, by all means. But the video below is closer to the shows I saw. Just imagine a lot less light, and a lot more people, and a lot less oxygen in the room.