Hear You Later

Koko Taylor passed away this week.  The lightning-holder and the earth-shaker, the woman who cut stone with a pen.

“Queen? Queen! No way,” my dad said, pointing to Aretha as the Queen of Everything Musical.

I didn’t argue the nuances of genres of music or the ease of labels and titles or the unimportance of them all.

Instead, I simply listened to Aretha while thinking about Koko.

To compliment one in no way takes away from the other, but it’s Koko I’m celebrating now.

A Woman’s Woman, I think, no Kate Chopin or Hillary Clinton. But a feminist nonetheless.

I think “Wang Dang Doodle” is unofficially her signature song.  But it was “I’m a Woman,” that influenced my thinking on the feminine perspective. It is, and should be, many women’s anthem.

She is, to me, the quintessential woman. In her song, “I’m a Woman, ” she presents herself as the ideal woman although I doubt that she would have ever thought that, roughly 30 years after the release of Earthshaker, the record on which “I’m a Woman” first appears, a woman so apparently different from her,  would ever consider her to be the “ideal woman.”

She was a prophet:

oh yeah
oh yeah
everything, everthing, everything gone be all right
oh yeah

A thick, black woman, she was the mother figure and how I saw God when I read The Shack.

She was both both a lover and a fighter, not necessarily in that order, and sometimes not so separately:

I’m a woman, I’m a ball of fire
I’m a woman, I can make love to a crocodile

I’m a woman,
I’m a love maker
I’m a woman,
you know I’m an earth shaker

She was literate and assertive:

Spelled  w o- m a n,
Oh yeah
That means I’m grown

She was self-assured and hungry, ambitious, and reaching:

I’m a woman, I know my stuff
I’m a woman, I ain’t never had enough

She was her voice, and yet she wasn’t limited to it:

I’m a woman, I’m a rushing wind
I’m a woman, I can cut stone with a pen

She was both a changer and the changed:

I’m a woman, I can change old to new

She did the so-called impossible and conquered her demons:

I’m going down yonder, behind the sun
I’m gonna do something for you, that ain’t never been done
I’m gonna hold back the lightning, with the palm of my hand
Shake hands with the devil, make him crawl in the sand

In other songs, she touches on sadness and humor, ostracism and loneliness. She is triumphant and low, down and dirty and tender.  Her voice evokes physical reactions, and that’s the true test of music for me.  She’d raise goosebumps as she belted. I’m not quite certain if my heart changed beat to match that dirty blues sound, or if she naturally found mine, but I come alive with her music, as if I were hyper-alive for the next three-and-a-half minutes.

I regret that I never was able to see her perform live, but I am oh-so-grateful that her music will live on.  I am far richer for it, and I think the world is as well.

This isn’t goodbye, of course, but rather hear you later.