📍Memphis, TN, USA
1928 – 1952“I was born Cora Walton in September 1928 on a sharecropper's farm near Memphis, Tennessee, in Bartlett, just outside the city, the youngest of six children. My parents called me Koko because I loved chocolate. We were very poor, and after my mother passed when I was small, and then my father, I left school after the third grade to help raise the family, picking cotton in the fields around Memphis. On the plantations I fell in love with music: the gospel singing in the churches on Sunday, and the blues I heard on the radio, from Memphis Minnie and Bessie Smith to the shows on WDIA and Nashville's WLAC. My brothers and I made our own music, and I sang whenever I could, in the fields and in church. As a young woman I moved into Memphis to clean houses, and there I met Robert Taylor, a truck driver everyone called Pops, who loved the blues as much as I did. In 1952 Pops and I moved to Chicago with only thirty-five cents and a box of Ritz crackers, and we married. I cleaned houses for wealthy families in the suburbs, and at night Pops and I went to the blues clubs on the South Side, where I started singing with the bands. In 1962 Willie Dixon heard me and said he had never heard a woman sing the blues like that, and he wrote Wang Dang Doodle for me, which became a hit in 1966 on Chess Records. I became the Queen of the Blues, winning a Grammy and many Blues Music Awards.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today