James Taylor
speaker
52 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Apr 2025
James Taylor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And James was even reported saying, the guy had sort of pinned me to the wall and was glistening with maniacal sweat and talking some freak speak about what he was going to do and stuff with how John was interested and he was going to get in touch with John Lennon.
The New Yorker Radio Hour · From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar · 18 Dec 2024
podcast
I studied cello when I was a kid. My parents thought it would be good for... There were five of us. So I got the cello and I played for about four years badly, reluctantly. I was a bad student and it never gave me the kind of feedback that I needed to have it take off and have its own momentum, its own reason to continue. But all along, I noticed that the guitar was going to be it for me.
And I finally prevailed on my folks. We lived in North Carolina. My mother would bring little groups of us up on the train to Manhattan to expose us to something other than trees. And we... Was it art or music or... Yeah, it was the shows that she took you to? Museums and shows. Yeah. And the city itself.
You know, my folks loved the Rodgers and Hammerstein, Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, My Fair Lady in South Pacific and Oklahoma, and some light classics and some folk music, too. And of course, I loved Elvis, and I loved the Beatles, and I loved Ray Charles. When I was exposed to those things, that's sort of the second tier of stuff I was exposed to.
That amazed me too and it just opened my eyes and I wanted to explore that music and I wanted to sing it, I wanted to play it. But I was 12 when I got a guitar here in Manhattan at Schermer's. Really? The Schermer Music Company. So you drove up with your mother to... Well, we took the train up and I think it was my mom and my dad on that trip. And we went to Schermer's and found a guitar.
I saw the Fender Electrics, the shape, the amazing finish of them, the way they looked, the chrome, the mother of toilet seat. But they wouldn't go for it. So it was a classic guitar. And immediately, I got, I'll show you what the first thing I ever played on it was. Simple, but... It spoke to me, and it just immediately started making sounds that I wanted to hear more of.
I don't know what happened to that damn cello. It's got to be around somewhere. I hope someone's playing it.
I wrote a song called, when I was 13 or 14, called Roll River Roll. It's pretty awful. I can play it for you.
No, it hasn't been widely covered. And the fact that nobody here tonight has ever heard it is proof of how lame it was. You know, it was really... This is something called Travis picking that we all learned.
Sort of a walking thumb. And then the one or two fingers thrown in.
Roll, river, roll Long as you can be Longest river I've done seen Rolling to the sea
Went like that.
I guess I was 19 when I went to London and got my recording contract with Apple Records, with the Beatles. And that was such an amazing reversal of fortune for me. That was the door that opened and let me through to the life that I've lived ever since. It was my big break. I'd been at it since, you know, when I came to New York in 1966, and instead of graduating high school, I came here and I
I started with Danny Kortschmar, a band called The Flying Machine. It was ill-fated, and we had problems, typical problems, and never got our recording deal that we needed. We signed one, but the people who signed it, they couldn't follow through with it. And after that fell to pieces in 66, when I was 18, I went home to North Carolina to recover a little bit. I needed soup. I needed a bed.
I needed my parents. I needed to go home. My dad actually heard me on the phone. I called him in North Carolina from from New York, and the band had been broken up for about a month, and he could hear that I wasn't well, and he said, you just stay right there. He got my address. He said, you stay right there. I'll be there in 10 hours, and he was.
I just sat there for 10 hours, and my dad showed up in a station wagon and took me home. That's one of my, you know, my treasures, that little, that memory, that thing he did. I wrote a song about it called Jump Up Behind Me.
This land is a lovely green. It reminds me of my own home. Such children I've seldom seen, even in my own home. The sky's so bright and clear.
And I think that that's, obviously, you want success. You want to be heard. You want to be listened to and encouraged.
But it's always that moment of going from the private thing, and in the case of a singer-songwriter who doesn't have a band who's sort of going there with him, sort of a posse or a crowd or a tribe that you're running with and doing it with, when you're doing it alone and by yourself, it is a very strange transition to make.
I wrote songs about that too, Hey Mister That's Me Up on the Jukebox or Fading Away or Company Man. Those are songs about the difficulty of starting off with a very private and personal thing. As my friend David Crosby says, the first album you make is the result of 10 years of work, then you've got a year to make the next one.
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