James Taylor
James Taylor | |
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 Taylor in 1977 | |
| Born | James Vernon Taylor March 12, 1948 Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. |
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| Years active | 1966–present |
| Spouses | Caroline Smedvig (m. 2001) |
| Children | 4, including Sally Taylor |
| Father | Isaac M. Taylor |
| Relatives |
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| Musical career | |
| Origin | Chapel Hill, North Carolina, U.S. |
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| Works | |
| Labels | |
| Formerly of | The Flying Machine |
| Website | jamestaylor |
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James Vernon Taylor (born March 12, 1948) is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist.
Taylor achieved his breakthrough in 1970 with the No. 3 single "Fire and Rain" and had his first No. 1 hit in 1971 with his recording of "You've Got a Friend", written by Carole King in the same year. Taylor's 1976 Greatest Hits album was certified Diamond and has sold 11 million copies in the US alone, making it one of the best-selling albums in US history.
Following his 1977 album JT, Taylor has retained a large audience over the decades. Every album that he released from 1977 to 2007 sold over 1 million copies; his combined album and single sales in the US is certified at 33 million.[6] Taylor enjoyed a resurgence in chart performance during the late 1990s and 2000s, when he recorded some of his most-awarded work including Hourglass, October Road, and Covers. Taylor achieved his first number-one album in the US in 2015 with Before This World.[7]
He is known for his cover versions, such as "How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You)" and "Handy Man", as well as originals such as "Sweet Baby James".[7] He played the leading role in Monte Hellman's 1971 film Two-Lane Blacktop. A six-time Grammy Award winner, Taylor was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000. As of 2026 Taylor continues to actively tour.
Early years
[edit]James Vernon Taylor was born at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston on March 12, 1948. His father, Isaac M. Taylor, worked as a resident physician at the hospital[8][9] and came from a wealthy Southern family.[8] Taylor is of English and Scottish descent from the Taylor family of the Montrose area,[10] with the former being rooted in Massachusetts Bay Colony; his ancestors include Edmund Rice, an English colonist who co-founded Sudbury, Massachusetts.[11] His mother, Gertrude (née Woodard; 1921–2015), studied singing with Marie Sundelius at the New England Conservatory of Music and was an aspiring opera singer before she married Isaac in 1946.[8][12] Taylor is the younger brother of musician Alex Taylor (1947–1993) and the older brother of musicians Kate Taylor (born 1949) and Livingston Taylor (born 1950).[13] His youngest sibling, a brother named Hugh (born 1952), was also a musician; Hugh eventually left the music industry and has operated The Outermost Inn, a bed-and-breakfast in Aquinnah, Massachusetts, with his wife since 1989.[13][14]
In 1951, Taylor and his family moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina,[15] when Isaac took a job as an assistant professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine.[16] They built a house in the Morgan Creek area off the present Morgan Creek Road, which was sparsely populated.[17] Taylor later said, "Chapel Hill, the Piedmont, the outlying hills, were tranquil, rural, beautiful, but quiet. Thinking of the red soil, caused by local copper mining, plus the seasons, the way things smelled down there, I feel as though my experience of coming of age there was more a matter of landscape and climate than people."[17] James attended a public primary school in Chapel Hill.[8] Isaac's career prospered, but he was frequently away from home on military service at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland or as part of Operation Deep Freeze in Antarctica in 1955 and 1956.[18] Isaac Taylor later rose to become dean of the UNC School of Medicine from 1964 to 1971.[19] Beginning in 1953, the Taylors spent summers on Martha's Vineyard.[20]
Taylor took cello lessons as a child in North Carolina, before learning the guitar in 1960.[21] His guitar style evolved, influenced by hymns, carols, and the music of Woody Guthrie, and his technique derived from his bass clef-oriented cello training and from experimenting on his sister Kate's keyboards: "My style was a finger-picking style that was meant to be like a piano, as if my thumb were my left hand, and my first, second, and third fingers were my right hand."[22] Spending summer holidays with his family on Martha's Vineyard, he met Danny Kortchmar, an aspiring teenage guitarist from Larchmont, New York.[23] The two began listening to and playing blues and folk music together, and Kortchmar felt that Taylor's singing had a "natural sense of phrasing, every syllable beautifully in time. I knew James had that thing."[24] Taylor wrote his first song on guitar at 14, and he continued to learn the instrument effortlessly.[22] By the summer of 1963, he and Kortchmar were playing coffeehouses around the Vineyard, billed as "Jamie & Kootch".[25]
In 1961, Taylor went to Milton Academy, a preparatory boarding school in Massachusetts. He faltered during his junior year, feeling uneasy in the high-pressure college prep environment despite having a good scholastic performance.[26] The Milton headmaster later said, "James was more sensitive and less goal-oriented than most students of his day."[27] He returned home to North Carolina to finish out the semester at Chapel Hill High School.[26] There he joined a band formed by his brother Alex called The Corsayers (later The Fabulous Corsairs), playing electric guitar; in 1964, they cut a single in Raleigh that featured James's song "Cha Cha Blues" on the B-side.[26] Having lost touch with his former school friends in North Carolina, Taylor returned to Milton for his senior year,[26] where he started applying to colleges to complete his education.[28] But he felt part of a "life that [he was] unable to lead", and he became depressed; he slept 20 hours each day, and his grades collapsed.[26][29] In late 1965 he committed himself to McLean, a psychiatric hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts,[26] where he was treated with chlorpromazine, and where the organized days began to give him a sense of time and structure.[27][29] As the Vietnam War escalated, Taylor received a psychological rejection from the Selective Service System, when he appeared before them, uncommunicative, with two white-suited McLean assistants.[30] Taylor earned a high school diploma in 1966 from the hospital's associated Arlington School.[30] He later viewed his nine-month stay at McLean as "a lifesaver... like a pardon or like a reprieve",[29] and both his brother Livingston and his sister Kate later were patients and students there as well.[27] As for his mental health struggles, Taylor thought of them as innate and said: "It's an inseparable part of my personality that I have these feelings."[28]
Career
[edit]1966–1969: Early career
[edit]At Kortchmar's urging, Taylor checked himself out of McLean and attended Elon University for a semester before he moved to New York City to form a band.[30][31] They recruited Joel O'Brien, formerly of Kortchmar's old band King Bees to play drums, and Taylor's childhood friend Zachary Wiesner (son of academic Jerome Wiesner) to play bass. After Taylor rejected the notion of naming the group after him, they called themselves the Flying Machine.[27][32] They played songs that Taylor had written at and about McLean, such as "Knocking 'Round the Zoo", "Don't Talk Now", and "The Blues Is Just a Bad Dream".[29][32] In some other songs, Taylor romanticized his life, but he was plagued by self-doubt.[33] By summer 1966, they were performing regularly at the high-visibility Night Owl Cafe in Greenwich Village, alongside acts such as the Turtles and Lothar and the Hand People.[34]
Taylor associated with a motley group of people and began using heroin, to Kortchmar's dismay.[27][34] In a late 1966 hasty recording session, the group cut a single, Taylor's "Night Owl", backed with his "Brighten Your Night with My Day".[35] Released on Rainy Day Records, distributed by Jubilee Records, it received some radio airplay in the Northeast,[35] but only charted at No. 102 nationally.[36] Other songs had been recorded during the same session, but Jubilee declined to go forward with an album.[35] After a series of poorly chosen appearances outside New York, culminating with a three-week stay at a failing nightspot in Freeport, Bahamas, for which they were never paid, the Flying Machine broke up.[35] (A UK band with the same name emerged in 1969 with the hit song "Smile a Little Smile for Me". The Flying Machine was briefly referenced in Taylor's song "Fire and Rain", and following his success as a solo artist, the band's recordings were later released in 1971 as James Taylor and the Original Flying Machine.)
Taylor would later say of this New York period, "I learned a lot about music and too much about drugs."[33] Indeed, his drug use had developed into full-blown heroin addiction during the final Flying Machine period: "I just fell into it, since it was as easy to get high in the Village as get a drink."[35] He hung out in Washington Square Park, playing guitar to ward off depression and then passing out, letting runaways and criminals stay at his apartment.[37] Finally out of money and abandoned by his manager, he made a desperate call one night to his father. Isaac Taylor flew to New York and staged a rescue, renting a car and driving all night back to North Carolina with James and his possessions.[37] Taylor spent six months getting treatment and making a tentative recovery; he also required a throat operation to fix vocal cords damaged from singing too harshly.[38]
Taylor decided to try being a solo act with a change of scenery. In late 1967, funded by a small family inheritance, he moved to London, living in various areas: Notting Hill, Belgravia, and Chelsea.[39] After recording some demos in Soho, his friend Kortchmar gave him his next big break. Kortchmar used his association with the King Bees (who once opened for Peter and Gordon), to connect Taylor to Peter Asher. Asher was A&R head for the Beatles' newly formed label Apple Records.[40] Taylor gave a demo tape of songs, including "Something in the Way She Moves", to Asher,[41] who then played the demo for Beatles Paul McCartney and George Harrison. McCartney remembers his first impression: "I just heard his voice and his guitar and I thought he was great ... and he came and played live, so it was just like, 'Wow, he's great.'"[40] Taylor became the first non-British act signed to Apple,[40] and he credits Asher for "opening the door" to his singing career.[41] Taylor said of Asher, who later became his manager, "I knew from the first time that we met that he was the right person to steer my career. He had this determination in his eye that I had never seen in anybody before."[42]: 70 Living chaotically in various places with various women, Taylor wrote additional material, including "Carolina in My Mind", and rehearsed with a new backing band.[43] Taylor recorded what would become his first album from July to October 1968, at Trident Studios, at the same time the Beatles were recording The White Album.[43][44] McCartney and an uncredited George Harrison guested on "Carolina in My Mind", whose lyric "holy host of others standing around me" referred to the Beatles, and the title phrase of Taylor's "Something in the Way She Moves" provided the lyrical starting point for Harrison's classic "Something".[45] McCartney and Asher brought in arranger Richard Anthony Hewson to add both orchestrations to several of the songs and unusual "link" passages between them; they would receive a mixed reception, at best.[46][47][48]
James had been through so much by the time he was twenty that he had so much to express in his music. Other young artists of his age whom I worked with sang about how good or bad life was but really had no idea what they were singing about. James was already singing with the conviction of a singer much older than himself. Everything that he had already been through was evident in his songwriting.
During the recording sessions, Taylor fell back into his drug habit by using heroin and methedrine.[46] He underwent physeptone treatment in a British program, returned to New York and was hospitalized there, and then finally committed himself to the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, which emphasized cultural and historical factors in trying to treat difficult psychiatric disorders.[49] Meanwhile, Apple released his debut album, James Taylor, in December 1968 in the UK and February 1969 in the US.[49] Critical reception was generally positive, including a complimentary review in Rolling Stone by Jon Landau, who said that "this album is the coolest breath of fresh air I've inhaled in a good long while. It knocks me out."[48] The record's commercial potential suffered from Taylor's inability to promote it because of his hospitalization, and it sold poorly; "Carolina in My Mind" was released as a single but failed to chart in the UK and only reached No. 118 on the U.S. charts.[49]
In July 1969, Taylor headlined a six-night stand at the Troubadour in Los Angeles. On July 20, he performed at the Newport Folk Festival as the last act and was cheered by thousands of fans who stayed in the rain to hear him.[50][51] His set at Newport was cut short after 15 minutes, when festival co-founder George Wein announced on stage that the Apollo 11 astronauts had landed on the moon.[52] Shortly thereafter, Taylor broke both hands and both feet in a motorcycle accident on Martha's Vineyard and was forced to stop playing for several months.[53] However, while recovering, he continued to write songs and in October 1969 signed a new deal with Warner Bros. Records.[53]
1970–1972: Warner Bros. and career breakthrough
[edit]
Once he had recovered, Taylor moved to California, keeping Asher as his manager and record producer. In December 1969, he held the recording sessions for his second album there. Titled Sweet Baby James, and featuring the participation of Carole King, the album was released in February 1970 and was Taylor's critical and popular breakthrough, buoyed by the single "Fire and Rain", a song about both Taylor's experiences attempting to break his drug habit by undergoing treatment in psychiatric institutions and the suicide of his friend Suzanne Schnerr. Both the album and the single reached No. 3 on the Billboard charts, with Sweet Baby James selling more than 1.5 million copies in its first year[27] and eventually more than 3 million in the United States alone. Sweet Baby James was received at its time as a folk-rock masterpiece, an album that effectively showcased Taylor's talents to the mainstream public, marking a direction he would take in following years. It earned several Grammy Award nominations including one for Album of the Year. It went on to be listed at No. 103 on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time in 2003, with "Fire and Rain" listed as No. 227 on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time in 2004.
During the time that Sweet Baby James was released, Taylor appeared with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys in a Monte Hellman film, Two-Lane Blacktop. In October 1970, he performed with his then partner Joni Mitchell, Phil Ochs, and the Canadian band Chilliwack at a Vancouver benefit concert that funded Greenpeace's protests of 1971 nuclear weapons tests by the US Atomic Energy Commission at Amchitka, Alaska; this performance was released in album format in 2009 as Amchitka, The 1970 Concert That Launched Greenpeace. In January 1971, sessions for Taylor's next album began.
He appeared on The Johnny Cash Show, singing "Sweet Baby James", "Fire and Rain", and "Country Road", on February 17, 1971. His career success at this point and appeal to female fans of various ages piqued tremendous interest in him, prompting a March 1, 1971, Time magazine cover story of him as "the face of new rock".[27] It compared his strong-but-brooding persona to that of Wuthering Heights' Heathcliff and to The Sorrows of Young Werther, and said, "Taylor's use of elemental imagery—darkness and sunlight, references to roads traveled and untraveled, to fears spoken and left unsaid—reaches a level both of intimacy and controlled emotion rarely achieved in purely pop music."[27] One of the writers described his look as "a cowboy Jesus", to which Taylor later replied, "I thought I was trying to look like George Harrison."[54]
Released in April 1971, Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon also gained critical acclaim and contained Taylor's biggest hit single in the US, a version of Carole King's new "You've Got a Friend" (featuring backing vocals by Joni Mitchell), which reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in late July. The follow-up single, "Long Ago and Far Away", also made the Top 40 and reached No. 4 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart. The album itself reached No. 2 on the album charts, which would be Taylor's highest position ever until the release of his 2015 album, Before This World, which went to No. 1 superseding Taylor Swift. In early 1972, Taylor won his first Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Male, for "You've Got a Friend"; King also won Song of the Year for the same song in that ceremony. The album went on to sell 2.5 million copies in the United States.
November 1972 heralded the release of Taylor's fourth album, One Man Dog. A concept album primarily recorded in his home recording studio, it featured a cameo by Linda Ronstadt along with Carole King, Carly Simon, and John McLaughlin. The album consisted of eighteen short pieces of music put together. Reception was generally lukewarm and, despite making the Top 10 of the Billboard Album Charts, its overall sales were disappointing. The lead single, "Don't Let Me Be Lonely Tonight", peaked at No. 14 on the Hot 100, and the follow-up, "One Man Parade", barely reached the Top 75. Almost simultaneously, Taylor married fellow singer-songwriter Carly Simon on November 3, in a small ceremony at her Murray Hill, Manhattan, apartment.[55] A post-concert party following a Taylor performance at Radio City Music Hall turned into a large-scale wedding party, and the Simon-Taylor marriage would find much public attention over the following years.[55] They had two children,