This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen magazine #103 (December 2002 / January 2003). The magazine is available on newsstands and by subscription.
Otis Taylor Everything Old is New Again
by Philip Van Vleck
When Otis Taylor won the 2002 W.C. Handy Award for Best New Artist, it may have seemed to some blues fans that Taylor came out of nowhere to snare this prize. That was hardly the case. There are no overnight success stories, and singer/songwriters of the caliber of Otis Taylor don't suddenly pop up like mushrooms after a rainstorm.
Whereas there's nothing new about Otis Taylor as a musician, Taylor's sound is news. What he brings to his music as a listener is a plethora of sources that reach all the way back to his childhood. As a player he makes frequent use of the banjo, which provides a huge clue as to his first musical interests. Blues artists and fans immediately recognized their genre in Taylor's sound and, as a lyricist, he writes very much in the blues idiom. He writes his own material, so his songs have a unique quality. His banjo playing imparts a strong country blues flavor to his music. To listen to his tunes is to simultaneously experience something new and something very old.
Taylor began his life in Chicago with a story that is a song in itself. "I was born in Chicago in 1948," he explained. "My father worked for the Pullman Company. My uncle — my mother's brother — was shot to death before I was even born, and she swore she was gonna leave Chicago when she had a chance. As it happened, my mother's grandmother bought some houses in Denver, so we moved to Colorado in '52. I was raised in Denver."
Taylor never had to go looking for music; it was a part of his environment from his earliest days.
"My father was a big jazz buff, and my mother's brother-in-law was a jazz player in Denver," he said. "My father was sort of a be-bopper, you know, he loved that lifestyle. He worked for the railroad, so he was like the musicians' best friend. He'd go to work and four days later he was in New York City, and four days after that he was in San Francisco. He knew everybody and everything. Back in those train days, if you needed anything, you went to see the Pullman guy — that was my father.
"I was raised in a hip environment," he added. "Too hip, sometimes. My folks would start partying Thursday night and that would go on until sometime Sunday. I'm what I call first-generation hip."
Any child with musical inclinations who grows up in a household like Otis Taylor's will surely find his/her own music before long. Taylor certainly did. It wasn't jazz or R&B or pop music that initially attracted him, however. "I got interested in folk music as a kid," he said. "The folklore center in Denver was like half-a-block away from where I walked to go to junior high school. The summer before I went to high school I discovered the Folklore Center — that was in '63 — and I basically never left the place. It was like I lived there. I'd go there on weekends and every day after school.
"A lot of kids were hanging out there. You'd listen to music and make friends. My whole life was based around the Denver Folklore Center until '67, when I moved to Boulder."
Asked if he moved to Boulder to attend the University of Colorado, Taylor replied: "No. I just went there to hang out. It was a college town. I was playing music and it was a hipper scene."
Taylor liked hanging out in Boulder so much that he still lives there. He began playing gigs as a teenager, doing the folk scene thing and honing his skills on banjo and harmonica. "I had this deal going where I'd do these jam gigs, and I'd pay guys $5 and make $100, so I eventually saved enough money to go to London," Taylor recalled. "I got to London and somebody told me to call the Vernon brothers — they owned Blue Horizon Records. So I looked them up and they signed me to their label, which was really weird. I was only 19 years old. They had to send my contract to my father so he could sign it on my behalf. And then I didn't do anything, because we just didn't know how to communicate. They wanted me to write stuff and record it. I didn't know how to tape stuff. So they sent me to this arranger in Wimbledon. They really did. They put me on a train and sent me to meet with this music arranger in Wimbledon. I had no idea what in the hell they were talking about.
"Then they sent me down to watch Fleetwood Mac record," he continued. "So I did that, and sat there in the studio, kind of bored. The next day the Vernon brothers ask me if I recorded anything with Fleetwood Mac. I was like, 'No. You told me to go watch them.' I would've loved to cut some tracks with them, of course, but that didn't happen. Then I ran out of money. I asked the Vernons for some money, and they said, 'We don't give you money to live on,' so I said, 'Okay. Bye.' The whole adventure lasted three weeks."
This is an excerpt from an article in Dirty Linen #103 (Dec. '02/Jan. '03). Read the full text in the magazine, available via subscription or on newsstands and in bookstores.
