Born on a farm near
Memphis, Tennessee, Taylor was the daughter of a sharecropper. She left Tennessee for
Chicago in 1952 with her husband, Robert "Pops" Taylor, a truck driver. and in 1964 a cut on a Chicago blues collection on Spivey Records, called
Chicago Blues. In 1964 Dixon brought Taylor to
Checker Records, a subsidiary label of
Chess Records, for which she recorded "
Wang Dang Doodle", a song written by Dixon and recorded by
Howlin' Wolf five years earlier. The record became a hit, reaching number four on the R&B chart and number 58 on the pop chart in 1966, and selling a million copies. She survived a near-fatal car crash in 1989. In the 1990s, she appeared in the films
Blues Brothers 2000 and
Wild at Heart. Taylor was survived by her daughter, two grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. ==Legacy==