James Taylor's guitar style began with cello lessons and a piano-minded thumb
James Taylor learned cello before guitar, and he shaped his finger-picking so his thumb played like a pianist's left hand. After heroin addiction and a failed New York band, a demo tape reached the Beatles' new label, and a gentle Boston-born songwriter went on to sell 33 million records in America.
Taylor was born in Boston in 1948, the son of a doctor from a wealthy Southern family and a mother who had trained as an opera singer. In 1951 the family moved to rural Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where his father taught medicine; Taylor later said the red soil, seasons and smells shaped his coming of age more than people did. He switched from cello to guitar in 1960, drawing on hymns, carols and Woody Guthrie. Summers on Martha's Vineyard brought him a friend and ally in the teenage guitarist Danny Kortchmar.
Boarding school at Milton Academy did not suit him, and after checking himself out of McLean hospital he formed the Flying Machine in New York with Kortchmar. Its 1966 single Night Owl only reached No. 102 nationally, and the band fell apart. In the city Taylor slid into heroin addiction, later remarking that he learned a lot about music and far too much about drugs. Broke and abandoned by his manager, he phoned his father, who flew up and drove him home through the night.
In late 1967 he tried London. Kortchmar connected him with Peter Asher, head of artists and repertoire at the Beatles' Apple Records, who played Taylor's demo, including Something in the Way She Moves, to Paul McCartney and George Harrison. The breakthrough came in 1970 with Fire and Rain, a No. 3 single, followed in 1971 by his first No. 1, a cover of Carole King's You've Got a Friend. The same year he starred in the film Two-Lane Blacktop.
His 1976 Greatest Hits went diamond with 11 million US sales. Every album from 1977 to 2007 sold over a million copies, a late surge produced award-winning records such as October Road, and in 2015 Before This World gave him his first American No. 1 album. He has won six Grammys and joined the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's ranks in 2000.
Source: James Taylor
