More pioneering soul hits (most notably "Disco Lady," "Jody's Got Your Girl And Gone" and "Steal Away") continued in the early seventies until Stax went bankrupt in 1975, ending an era. His first great successes came in the late sixties and early seventies after he hooked up with the Motown-schooled producer Don Davis at Stax Records on such early tracks as "Who's Makin' Love" and "I Believe In You (You Believe In Me)." Taylor's southern-grit vocal style and Davis' Motown-style horns and female choruses made for a knockout blend of urban and rural soul. He was schooled in gospel quartets and eventually joined the Soul Stirrers as the legendary Sam Cooke's handpicked replacement. Johnnie Taylor was born in Crawford, Arkansas, just across the Mississippi River from Memphis, Tennessee. Whatever the technique, it's rendered with seemingly effortless grace. Taylor's vocals conjure at different times the precision and wit of a surgeon's scalpel, the passion and scruffiness of a street balladeer, the slickness and pomp of a king's court, or the lilting innocence of a young lover. Not only has he recorded more rhythm and blues standards than any other artist-he has done so in infinitely varied ways. When one thinks of the greatest vocalists of the last half-century, it is impossible to overlook Taylor's place among them. What was that promise? That somewhere out of the ravaged R&B wasteland left by the successive invasions of disco, funk, rap and hiphop, a musician would come slouching toward Jackson with the promise of a rhythm and blues renaissance.Įlla Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Aretha Franklin, Bobby "Blue" Bland. Along the way he fulfilled the promise of his early work. How did Johnnie Taylor walk the tightrope between those two extremes? How did he maintain his dignity and equilibrium? How did he keep his eye on his aesthetic vision? We know he did, because in the years after he joined Jackson, Mississippi's Malaco Records, he released one album after another that defined the direction for all Southern Soul blues artists to come. On the other, he was an artist so beloved and envied by his core audience and peers that a press release by his longtime record company, Malaco Records, says Taylor "was a flame that melted the wax on most wings daring to draw close." On the one hand, he was an artist frustrated and embittered by nearly twenty years of neglect by the mainstream music industry. This, then, is the irony of Johnnie Taylor's career. Johnnie Taylor was one of those artists-artists, in other words, who spent a major portion of their careers in a virtual musical apartheid. Southern Soul, on the other hand, fell upon hard times, and its flagship artists- Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, Al Green, Clarence Carter, Bobby Bland, Joe Simon and others-disappeared from the best-seller charts and the public consciousness. Soul music fell into a "dark age" from which it has never recovered.ĭisco acts ( Michael Jackson, Kool & The Gang, Earth Wind & Fire, etc.) borrowed far more heavily from the Northern strain, which had always favored a slicker, more orchestral sound. When Disco conquered the R&B world in the seventies, it obliterated the two strains of classic soul-Detroit/Philly in the North and Memphis/Muscle Shoals in the South-that had between them made Rhythm & Blues a fixture of popular music. Listen to Johnnie Taylor singing "Soul Heaven" on YouTube. To automatically link to Johnnie Taylor's charted radio singles, awards, CD's and many other references on the website, go to "Taylor, Johnnie" in Daddy B. "ON THE IMPORTANCE OF BIG HEAD HUNDREDS (Which could have and should have been just the beginning of a new phase in Johnnie Taylor's career.)" (Tidbit #1) Nice's "Johnnie Taylor Did It All Before" (Tidbit #4) and.
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See "Tidbits" below for the latest updates on Johnnie Taylor.Īlso included: Daddy B. See Ronnie Lovejoy Artist Guide for the back-story. In doing so, "Soul Heaven" moves back into the #1 spot on the Top 100 Southern Soul Songs chart, upending the more deserving "Sho' Wasn't Me," which I shall continue to headline as the "#1 Song in Southern Soul" on the Ronnie Lovejoy page. It's time to reinstate Taylor in the #1 spot of the Top 100 Southern Soul Artists chart where everyone intimate with southern soul knows he belongs. But that experiment, I think, has run its course.
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Nice's Guide to Ronnie Lovejoy know that for the past year and a half I have relegated Johnnie Taylor to the #2 Southern Soul Artist so that I could right a perceived wrong and feature Lovejoy's "Sho' Wasn't Me" as the #1 Song in Southern Soul. July 14, 2019: Top Of The Charts Readers of Daddy B. Listen to a fantastic new documentary/video on Johnnie Taylor's career! Nice's Top 100 Countdown: The New Generation (Chart In Progress) Johnnie Taylor - Southern Soul Music Artist - Southern Soul RnB