Mourners Paid Tribute to Koko Taylor Yesterday

Mayor Richard Daley and musicians Delores Scott and Vance Kelly were among the mourners that paid tribute to the "Queen of the Blues" as she lay in a glass-topped casket at the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition headquarters on Chicago's South Side. Taylor's
dream as a child to become a blues singer was nurtured in the cotton fields outside her family's sharecropper shack outside of Memphis, Tenn.

"I used to listen to the radio, and when I was about 18 years old, B.B. King was a disc jockey and he had a radio program, 15 minutes a day, over in West Memphis, Arkansas and he would play the blues," she said. "I would hear different records and things by Muddy Waters, Bessie Smith, Memphis Minnie, Sonnyboy Williams and all these people, you know, which I just loved."

Her work included the best-selling song "Wang Dang Doodle" and tunes such as "What Kind of Man is This" and "I Got What It Takes." She earned seven Grammy nominations and won in 1984. Following another wake at Rianbow/PUSH headquarters, the Rev. Jesse Jackson will eulogize her.