Back to School

The term old school is one of the biggest clichés of the modern world, but when Koko Taylor says it, it has the ring of truth. The blues songstress’s new disc, Old School (Alligator), drops all the commercial affectations that marked her most recent albums and gets straight-up rootsy, with a lineup that includes harmonicist Billy Branch, guitarists “Steady Rollin’” Bob Margolin and Criss Johnson, and veteran Chicago roots-music upright bassist Jimmy Sutton. Classic-rock covers and thumb-popping funk bass are nowhere to be heard, but it’s not a stale museum piece, either. If you were to ask Taylor, she never left the grit behind in the first place.

“You can’t go far from the roots,” she says of her first album in seven years, adding that Alligator label head Bruce Iglauer was key in guiding her back to Old School’s organic sound. “He said it seems like this is the era we’re in now—people are wanting more traditional sounds from the blues. So that’s what I did.”

Taylor not only knows traditional music, she took the gutbucket sound into the charts. When blues was losing its hold on the black audience, Taylor scored a left-field top ten R&B hit in 1966 with the weirdly syncopated “Wang Dang Doodle,” which remains her big set closer. This song made no concession to the ongoing soul revolution at all, and was one of the last times a song this down-home would see the inside of the top ten. Pretty soon, Taylor was plucked from the tavern blues joints and went out on the road with the hot soul acts of the time. “That kinda opened the doors to get me with some of the other major acts that weren’t in the blues arena,” she says. “Back in the ‘Wang Dang Doodle’ days there were people that are now solo but weren’t then, like Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, or Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles. I worked with the Aretha Franklins, Etta James, the Dells, those type of shows.”

It’s hard to say whether this was a direct response to the recent success of greasier blues acts such as T-Model Ford, but it’s good to hear Taylor unload on material like this again. At a point where all of her contemporaries and disciples are either singing the same standards or rocking it up for the sports-bar crowd, the 79-year-old diva is reclaiming her stride with a set of classic Chi-town shuffle blues done right. So what has she been up to in the last few years between albums?

“Touring, working a lot. Up until my illness”—in late 2003 she was briefly hospitalized for gastrointestinal bleeding—“I was working 200 dates a year, so there was never a lot of time for me to sit and do a lot of writing.” She took an 18-month break to regain her health; that downtime also allowed her to focus on writing, and five of the six songs she penned during that period made it onto Old School.

Two of the album’s remaining covers are special as well, coming from the songbook of her old producer and mentor, the late Willie Dixon. A renowned songwriter, Dixon figured into Taylor’s career early on, producing her first single for USA Records (“Honky Tonky”) before bringing her to the legendary Chess label, which defined Chicago blues with the likes of Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters. This is where she recorded “Wang Dang Doodle,” and while Taylor never scored another hit single, she stayed with Chess through 1972, with several singles and two albums. In that time, Chess had gone from being a family-owned company to a corporate-run name brand and soon would go out of business altogether; a switch to the younger, feistier Alligator in 1975 slowly renewed her career, starting with the surprisingly raw I Got What It Takes.

As a blues resurgence picked up steam through the ’80s, Taylor rocked up her sound a little, eventually giving blues makeovers to Ted Nugent and Melissa Etheridge songs. Old School finds her closing the circle. So much so that some of her self-penned songs “actually were rearranged to make a more traditional sound,” Taylor says. “I’m still excited because blues is what I love, blues is where I started, blues is what made me, and blues is what I want to keep alive.”

Old School hits stores Tuesday 3, and Taylor will sign copies at Borders Books & Music (150 N State St). See listings.