PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: December 6, 2007
CONTACT: Marc Lipkin / Alligator Records / 773-973-7736 x235
EMAIL: publicity@allig.com
 

QUEEN OF THE BLUES KOKO TAYLOR RECEIVES GRAMMY AWARD
NOMINATION FOR 2007 RELEASE, OLD SCHOOL
 

CATEGORY 66 -- Best Traditional Blues Album
Koko Taylor – OLD SCHOOL

Queen Of The Blues Koko Taylor has received a Grammy Award nomination for Best Traditional Blues Album for her 2007 release, Old School. The announcement was made earlier today by The Recording Academy, whose membership includes recording artists, producers, engineers, designers, liner note writers and others involved in the creative aspects of the recording industry. 2008 marks the 50th anniversary of the Grammy Awards. The winners will be announced on February 10 in Los Angeles.

Known worldwide as The Queen Of The Blues, Koko Taylor was born and raised on a sharecropper's farm just outside of Memphis and began singing in church as a child. At 18, Taylor moved to Chicago. While working as a domestic on Chicago's ritzy North Shore by day, she began to sit in with the various blues bands across the city's South Side at night. The great producer/songwriter Willie Dixon heard Koko singing with Howlin' Wolf's band one night and quickly secured a contract with Chess Records for her, where she scored a million-selling hit with Wang Dang Doodle.

Over the course of her nine Alligator albums, Taylor has won every award the blues world has to offer, including eight Grammy Award nominations. She won a Grammy Award in 1984 for her participation in the compilation album Blues Explosion. Taylor has performed for Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and appeared on television and in movies countless times.

On Old School, Taylor returns to the sounds of the 1950s electric blues she heard when first arriving in Chicago on a Greyhound bus from Memphis. With five original compositions (more than she has written on any previous recording) and singular reinterpretations of songs she carefully chose, Old School has been hailed as the best album of her entire career.

“Old School is destined to be remembered as one of the top blues albums of 2007, and one of the best projects in her illustrious discography.”
--Billboard

“No other living vocalist, male or female, tackles Chicago blues with as much toughness as Koko Taylor. The fierceness of her delivery is matched by the stark imagery of the songs.”
--San Francisco Chronicle

“Old School tears into its blues with a vengeance. Ms. Taylor sounds like she still knows exactly what she wants.”
--The New York Times

“Taylor is singing as well as she has at any time in the last couple of decades. The Queen of the Blues is back atop her throne.”
--The Chicago Sun-Times

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