Koko Taylor - I’m A Woman

McDaniel & Taylor, BMG Platinum Songs obo Arc Music, BMI

With her huge, gritty voice and enormous stage presence, she was known as “The Queen Of The Blues.” But Koko came up the hard way. She left school to pick cotton on her family’s sharecroppers’ farm, was orphaned as a teen, came to Chicago in the back of a Greyhound bus with, “thirty-five cents and a box of Ritz Crackers,” and worked as a laundress and housemaid. The great blues songwriter/producer Willie Dixon spotted her sitting in with Howlin’ Wolf and brought her to Chess Records, where she scored the label’s last big blues hit single, Wang Dang Doodle. When Chess was sold and the gigs dried up, she returned to “scrubbing the rich folks’ floors.” Her 1974 Alligator debut, I Got What It Takes put her back on the road. But it was The Earthshaker that made her a festival and club headliner. For that album, she wrote the anthem she was so proud of— I’m A Woman. She sang it at every performance for the next 30 years.