James Vernon Taylor (12 de marzo de 1948, Boston, Massachusetts) es un cantautor y guitarrista estadounidense, ganador de cinco Premios Grammy.
Su primer éxito fue el sencillo «Fire and Rain» de su segundo álbum Sweet Baby James (1970), disco que ocupa el puesto 103 de la lista de los 500 mejores álbumes de todos los tiempos de la revista Rolling Stone. El año siguiente, su versión de la canción de su amiga Carole King, «You've Got a Friend», alcanzó el puesto número 1.
Su álbum recopilatorio, Greatest Hits, de 1976, fue certificado disco Diamante por la RIAA, con doce millones de copias vendidas solo en los Estados Unidos.
Nacido en Boston, Massachusetts, pasó su infancia en Chapel Hill, Carolina del Norte. La carrera de Taylor comenzó a mediados de los años sesenta, pero encontró su público a inicios de los setenta cantando canciones acústicas suaves y sensibles. Taylor formó parte de una ola de cantautores suaves que incluye a Carole King, Joni Mitchell, John Denver, Jackson Browne y Carly Simon, con quien se casó más tarde. Fue precisamente el éxito comercial de Taylor que abrió el camino para toda esta generación de cantautores.2
Como músico, ha participado en numerosas grabaciones como guitarrista acústico y vocalista ya incluso antes de ascender a la fama, como en el caso del LP Tapestry, de Carole King. Su particular estilo Fingerpicking, unido a sus constantes Hammer-on y pull-off de las cuerdas prima (Mi) y segunda (Si), al tiempo que acordes abiertos abundantes de cuartas suspendidas ha sido un referente de los guitarristas acústicos desde los años 70. Admirado como músico, se ha rodeado tanto en grabaciones como en giras siempre de grandes figuras como Larry Goldings, Steve Gadd, Danny Kortchmar, Michael Brecker, Michael Landau, David Sanborn, Arnold McCuller y muchos otros. Desde el 17 de diciembre de 2010 inició desde su web site oficial unas clases de guitarra para mostrar su técnica al gran público, siendo el primero que ha perfeccionado dichas grabaciones con una cámara dentro y fuera de la guitarra simultáneas, que muestran tanto la digitación de la mano izquierda como la derecha, con total exactitud.3
Su primer álbum, James Taylor (1968), fue el primer álbum publicado por el sello discográfico de The Beatles, Apple Records, y contó con la colaboración de George Harrison y Paul McCartney, aunque solo McCartney figura en los créditos.
Su primer éxito en alcanzar el número 10 (Top 10 hit) en las listas americanas fue «Fire and Rain», una canción introspectiva cuyas tres estrofas versan sobre diferentes etapas de la vida del artista, incluida su estancia en un hospital mental donde fue internado para recuperarse de episodios de ansiedad acrecentados con el consumo de drogas, que superaría definitivamente en los años 80, según él mismo ha confesado.
El siguiente LP lanzado por el artista vendió más de un millón de copias, Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon, que incluía el single «You've Got a Friend», tema escrito por su buena amiga Carole King. Por esta grabación ganó un Grammy en 1971 al mejor cantante pop masculino. En 1972, Taylor volvió a ganar un Disco de Oro por las ventas de su LP One Man Dog, al que siguió en 1973 su LP Walking Man. El álbum Gorilla (1975) incluyó otros dos grandes hits para las listas musicales en los Estados Unidos: «How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)», de Holland-Dozier-Holland y «Mexico». Siguiendo a su último disco con la Warner Brothers, su álbum In the Pocket, Taylor cambió de compañía discográfica, firmando con Columbia Records y lanzando algunos de sus discos más exitosos: JT (1977) un disco doble platino; Flag (1979); Dad Loves His Work (1981); That's Why I'm Here (1985); Never Die Young (1988); New Moon Shine (1991); el disco doble Live (1993); en (1994) presta su voz para el episodio 96 de la quinta temporada de Los Simpson en el que se interpreta a sí mismo, cantando una versión alterada de «Fire and Rain» específicamente para el episodio, Hourglass (1998), ganando entonces su primer Grammy al mejor álbum de pop del año; y October Road (2002), todos discos de platino.5
La US National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences le seleccionó como su Personaje MusiCares del año en 2006, y su nuevo CD, One Man Band (2007), fue nominado en los Premios Emmy.
En 2006, Taylor interpretó la canción Our Town, escrita por Randy Newman, de la película de Pixar, Cars. La canción fue nominada a Mejor Canción Original en los Premios Óscar de 2006.
En el año 2009 realizó una aparición en la película Funny People junto a Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen y Leslie Mann, aunque su primera aparición en el cine vino de la mano del director Monte Hellman, en la película Two-Lane Blacktop, de la que fue protagonista, aunque no tuvo demasiado éxito.
En el año 2000 Taylor ingresó por méritos propios en el Rock and Roll Hall of Fame y el prestigioso Songwriters Hall of Fame. En el año 2011 recibió la Medalla Nacional de las Artes 2010 de manos del Presidente de los Estados Unidos Barack Obama en una ceremonia en la Casa Blanca. En 2012 recibió la distinción de Caballero de la Orden de las Artes y las Letras por el Gobierno de Francia.7 Otros artistas americanos que han recibido dicho galardón son: Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Van Morrison, Frederica von Stade, Philip Glass, Juanes, Kylie Minogue o Andre Rieu.
James Taylor ha sido nombrado Doctor Honoris Causa por el Williams College y el Berklee School of Music. Aunque pasó su juventud en Carolina del Norte, vive en la zona oeste de Massachusetts, con su mujer Caroline y los hijos de ambos Henry y Rufus.
James Vernon Taylor (born March 12, 1948) is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist. A five-time Grammy Award winner, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000. He is one of the best-selling music artists of all time, having sold more than 100 million records worldwide.
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. His 1976 Greatest Hits album was certified Diamond and has sold 12 million US copies. Following his 1977 album, JT, he has retained a large audience over the decades. Every album that he released from 1977 to 2007 sold over 1 million copies. He 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). He achieved his first number-one album in the US in 2015 with his recording Before This World.
He is known for his popular covers, such as "How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You)" and "Handy Man", as well as originals such as "Sweet Baby James".
ames Vernon Taylor was born at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston on March 12, 1948, where his father, Isaac M. Taylor, worked as a resident physician. His father came from a wealthy Scottish family from the South, however, part of his ancestral roots are deep in Massachusetts Bay Colony and include Edmund Rice, one of the founders of Sudbury, Massachusetts. His mother, the former Gertrude Woodard (1921–2015), studied singing with Marie Sundelius at the New England Conservatory of Music and was an aspiring opera singer before the couple's marriage in 1946. James was the second of five children, the others being Alex (1947–1993), Kate (born 1949), Livingston (born 1950), and Hugh (born 1952).
In 1951, his family moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina,[10] when Isaac took a job as an assistant professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. They built a house in the Morgan Creek area off the present Morgan Creek Road, which was sparsely populated. James would later say, "Chapel Hill, the Piedmont, the outlying hills, were tranquil, rural, beautiful, but quiet. Thinking of the red soil, 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." James attended public primary school in Chapel Hill. 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. Isaac Taylor later rose to become dean of the UNC School of Medicine from 1964 to 1971. Beginning in 1953, the Taylors spent summers on Martha's Vineyard.
James first learned to play the cello as a child in North Carolina and switched to the guitar in 1960.[16] 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." He began attending Milton Academy, a preparatory boarding school in Massachusetts in fall 1961. Summering before then with his family on Martha's Vineyard, he met Danny Kortchmar, an aspiring teenage guitarist from Larchmont, New York. The two began listening to and playing blues and folk music together, and Kortchmar quickly realized that Taylor's singing had a "natural sense of phrasing, every syllable beautifully in time. I knew James had that thing." Taylor wrote his first song on guitar at 14, and he continued to learn the instrument effortlessly. By the summer of 1963, he and Kortchmar were playing coffeehouses around the Vineyard, billed as "Jamie & Kootch".
Taylor faltered during his junior year at Milton, feeling uneasy in the high-pressure college prep environment despite good scholastic performance. The Milton headmaster would later say, "James was more sensitive and less goal-oriented than most students of his day." He returned home to North Carolina to finish out the semester at Chapel Hill High School. 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. Having lost touch with his former school friends in North Carolina, Taylor returned to Milton for his senior year.
There, Taylor started applying to colleges but soon descended into depression; his grades collapsed, he slept 20 hours each day, and he felt part of a "life that [he was] unable to lead." In late 1965 he committed himself to the renowned McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, where he was treated with Thorazine and where the organized days began to give him a sense of time and structure. As the Vietnam War escalated, Taylor received a psychological rejection from Selective Service System when he appeared before them with two white-suited McLean assistants and was uncommunicative. Taylor earned a high school diploma in 1966 from the hospital's associated Arlington School. He would later view his nine-month stay at McLean as "a lifesaver ... like a pardon or like a reprieve," and both his brother Livingston and sister Kate would later be patients and students there as well. As for his mental health struggles, Taylor would think of them as innate and say: "It's an inseparable part of my personality that I have these feelings."
