Ben Lewis was combing through photographs, greeting cards and business documents for sale at a booth at the flea market in Back of the Yards last week when he suddenly had “a deer in the headlights moment.” One name — Koko Taylor — appeared on everything he picked up.
Suddenly, Lewis realized he was surrounded by irreplaceable keepsakes once owned by the Chicago singer known worldwide as the “Queen of the Blues” and considered the greatest female blues singer of her generation.
Taylor died in 2009. Yet important artifacts from her life in music were now spread out across cheap portable tables and in plastic bins for anyone with a few dollars in their pockets to buy.
The haul included photos of Taylor with President Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Willie Nelson, Robert Plant, James Brown, Eric Clapton and “Blues Brothers” John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. Signed photos to her from Bonnie Raitt (who wrote, “So great to be on the same show finally!!”), Etta James and even the rock band Styx. Her two 1985 W.C. Handy Awards for Blues Entertainer of the Year and Best Blues Vocalist of the Year. Several dozen handwritten song lyrics, including from her 2013 song “Ernestine.” Christmas cards.
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Pat Nabong/Sun-Times
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Pat Nabong/Sun-Times
Lewis, an artist who lives in Tri-Taylor, returned this week and found more Taylor material: stage dresses, newspaper clippings, business contracts and even her bank statements, bills and a Bible dictionary.
He scooped up what he could — $15 for a batch of handwritten song lyrics, among other items — and brought them home.
“I can’t believe this stuff is being sold out there,” he said.
Junk dealer’s unwitting purchase
How the possessions of a Grammy-winning icon ended up in a flea market on the South Side of Chicago and not in a protected archive at a university or museum was at first unclear to Louis and others.
The saga began four months ago when Luis Gonzaga, a Chicago-based junk dealer, purchased, sight unseen, the contents of a storage locker in Orland Park via an online auction. In the storage industry, it is common practice for storage lockers to be liquidated following months of delinquency. Gonzaga, who has been purchasing storage lockers for six years, said he did not know about Taylor’s link to his winning bid until customers started asking him about the items.
“I don’t really know her, but I now see how much other people know her,” he said.
Inside the locker, he discovered a bundle of cash — “a pretty nice amount” — which is why he is motivated to sell the rest at a heavy discount.
“I already got my little blessing from her and wanted to give the stuff back because a lot of people know her. So, I wanted her stuff being out there [rather] than being lost,” he said.
Among the items already sold, said Gonzaga: Her 1985 Grammy Award for Best Traditional Blues Album, several guitars, some stage wear and pictures. He still has an unopened bottle of Champagne and an accompanying letter of congratulations from blues star B.B. King. There’s also a file cabinet full of letters and other documents.
Gonzaga said he had been unable to connect with Taylor’s family.
Reached by phone by the Sun-Times, Joyce “Cookie” Threatt, Taylor’s only daughter, said it was an urgent health issue that led her to miss the payment on the locker that ultimately led to the loss of the possessions. Threatt said her mother, who lived in Country Club Hills, rented the locker in 2005.
“She had so much, so many awards, so much this, so much that, and only so much can go into a home,” she said.
Daughter’s health problems complicate situation
After her mom’s death, Threatt continued paying the monthly fee, even when she and her husband relocated to Arizona four years ago. In the years since, she made one more move, to Florida, to be near her children and grandchildren, and this year, underwent heart surgery and was diagnosed with cancer.
“I didn’t have time to think about storage,” she said.
Over the years, Threatt donated many of her mother’s other belongings to various museums — The Blues Heaven Foundation in Chicago, the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the Blues Hall of Fame Museum in Memphis and the Illinois Rock & Roll Museum on Route 66 in Joliet. As for the rest on display at Swap-O-Rama, she said she “would love to have it back.”
She is asking people who purchased the items and want to return them to contact her through the Blues Heaven Foundation. Bruce Iglauer, president and founder of Alligator Records, who served as Taylor’s manager and who recorded her from 1975 until her death, said he has been trying to reach Gonzaga to buy whatever remains and return it to Taylor’s family. Lewis said he plans to donate the majority of items he purchased to the Illinois Rock & Roll Museum.
Ron Romero, the CEO and co-founder of the museum, said he has received numerous emails, texts messages and calls over the last two weeks from people alerting him to the archive. He said he is sympathetic to the circumstances that led to the auction of Taylor’s storage locker.
“You learn real quick that our favorite stars are real people, they have real things they deal with in life and you don’t know what it may be,” he said.
The museum will take any donations and add it to the collection of Taylor awards and dresses they already have on display on the museum’s first floor, he said.
“It’s very important to keep the legacy alive. These artists gave something to the world and it’s important for people to figuratively breathe that in,” he said.
Iglauer said Taylor was known for saving mementos from her career in music, especially photographs. She also preferred writing out lyrics when she recorded, opposed to singing from printed lyrics, because, to her, she liked singing “to a continuous flow of words” without line breaks.
Lewis kept a few of the lyric sheets for his 16-year-old daughter, who coincidentally sings some Taylor songs as part of her School of Rock performances.
“It was her birthday” the day he found the items, he said. “When I came home with those lyrics, her jaw dropped. She already had huge respect for [Taylor]. What better birthday present could I give her?”
Koko Taylor was ‘bigger than life’ on stage, but shy off of it: Iglauer
Koko Taylor’s life is a remarkable story of resilience.
Taylor grow up on a sharecropper’s farm outside Memphis. Her early life was marked by stark poverty. She dropped out of school after third grade to help raise her siblings following the death of her mother.
In 1952, she moved to Chicago, where she worked as a laundress and a housekeeper.
A decade later, she met Willie Dixon, the Chess Records house composer and bassist, who helped secure her first recording contract. In 1965, she scored a million-selling hit, “Wang Dang Doodle,” that would become her signature song — and a blues standard — until her death.
Taylor recorded 10 albums for Alligator and performed throughout the world at some of the most prestigious concert halls and stages. Her voice — rough, raw and mighty — was one of the great instruments in modern blues.
“She had a bigger-than-life stage presence. Offstage, she was kind of shy. Onstage, she stepped up into a towering figure. She didn’t know how to hold back. She just made a complete emotional commitment to every performance and every song,” said Bruce Iglauer, Taylor’s manager and the founder of Alligator records.
Taylor eventually finished the schooling she missed out on in childhood. She also had a remarkable work ethic, Iglauer said.
“If she wasn’t doing something valuable and wasn’t entertaining the masses, she felt she didn’t complete the day,” he said. “She always said, ‘If I make one person feel better because of my singing, I did my job.’”
— Mark Guarino