James Taylor 1969 Caricature

James Taylor 1969 Caricature, age 21, illustrated here on May 20, 1969 from a photo shoot by Jack Robinson.

James Vernon Taylor 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.

In 1948 Taylor was born in Boston, Massachusetts into a wealthy family, whose father was a physician.

Summering in 1961 with his family on Martha’s Vineyard, he met Danny Kortchmar, an aspiring teenage guitarist from Larchmont, New York. By the summer of 1963, he and Kortchmar were playing coffeehouses around the Vineyard, billed as “Jamie & Kootch”.

During his college years, he struggled with depression and was treated with Thorazine. By 1966 his drug use had developed into a full-blown heroin addiction. He spent six months getting treatment and making a tentative recovery; he also required a throat operation to fix vocal cords damaged from singing too harshly.

In late 1967, he moved to London, living in various areas: Notting Hill, Belgravia, and Chelsea. After recording some demos in Soho, his friend Kortchmar connected him to Peter Asher. Asher was A&R head for the Beatles’ newly formed label Apple Records. Taylor gave a demo tape of songs, including “Something In The Way She Moves,” to Asher, who then played the demo for Beatles Paul McCartney and George Harrison. The title phrase of Taylor’s “Something in the Way She Moves” provided the lyrical starting point for Harrison’s classic “Something”. Taylor became the first non-British act signed to Apple Records.
It was at this time that he wrote “Carolina On My Mind”. Meanwhile, Apple released his debut album, “James Taylor”, in December 1968 in the UK and February 1969 in the US. Critical reception was generally positive, but the album failed to get traction.

In 1969, Taylor moved to California and signed with Warner Brother Records, keepin Asher as his manager. In December that year he recorded his classic second album, “Sweet Baby James”, featuring the participation of Carole King.
Released in February 1970 it became Taylor’s critical and popular triumph, buoyed by the single “Fire and Rain”; both the album and the single reached #3 on the Billboard charts, with “Sweet Baby James” selling more than 1.5 million copies in its first year. Sweet Baby James was received at its time as a folk-rock masterpiece.

His follow-up album released in April, 1971, “Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon” also gained critical acclaim and contained Taylor’s biggest hit single in the US, a version of the Carole King standard “You’ve Got a Friend” (featuring backing vocals by Joni Mitchell), which reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in late July.

Over the course of his career, Taylor has had a number of hits: “Shower The People”, “Mexico”, “How Sweet It Is” and “Rainy Day Man” along with a host of many more.

Taylor was once married (1972-1983) to singer/songwriter Carly Simon.