There is no doubt that, by the time of her death in 2009, Koko Taylor had more than earned her moniker of \u201cQueen Of The Blues.\u201d While she first tasted success in the 1960s with Chess Records, it was her series of releases on Alligator that pushed her to superstardom in the genre.<\/p>\n
If you base your opinion of Taylor on her 1975 Alligator debut I Got What It Takes<\/i>, though, you might walk away a bit unimpressed. This is less of a powerful statement of her return than a tentative first step.<\/p>\n
Maybe it\u2019s the somewhat loose performances on a few tracks\u2014where beats are added or even skipped\u2014that threw me for a loop. Maybe it\u2019s the rougher-edge production of the album, which doesn\u2019t have the polish that future releases did (though this tended to be a trademark of Alligator\u2019s early days). Maybe it\u2019s an overreliance on Abb Locke\u2019s saxophone, rather than the dual guitar work of Mighty Joe Young and Sammy Lawhorn that gnaws at me.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not that Taylor isn\u2019t in fine voice; she proves with the opening track \u201cTrying To Make A Living\u201d that she still has the power and swagger that propelled her to stardom just a decade prior with \u201cWang Dang Doodle.\u201d But sometimes it feels like the source material she had wasn\u2019t necessarily the strongest for an artist of her caliber. For every track like \u201cVoodoo Woman\u201d and \u201cHonkey Tonkey\u201d (both of which were written by Taylor), there are songs like her takes on \u201cBig Boss Man\u201d and the title track which just fail to inspire.<\/p>\n
Yet there are tracks that give plenty of hope. By the time one reaches the last three songs on the album, Taylor finally sounds like she\u2019s getting comfortable enough to throw some personality into the delivery. Had there been more numbers like \u201cHappy Home\u201d and \u201cFind A Fool,\u201d this disc would have been more noteworthy.<\/p>\n
If anything, I Got What It Takes<\/i> serves as an initial volley for Taylor. It let the blues world know not only that she was still around, but that she wasn\u2019t going to be taken lightly. Yet she ended up treading a little more carefully\u2014in this case, maybe too<\/i> carefully\u2014with this outing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":34544,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[6376],"rating":[5614],"class_list":["post-46390","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-koko-taylor","rating-rating-c-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46390"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46390\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=46390"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=46390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}