James Taylor

Early years[edit]

James Vernon Taylor was born at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston on March 12, 1948. His father, Isaac M. Taylor, worked as a resident physician at the hospital^[7][8] and came from a wealthy Southern family.^[7] Taylor is of English and Scottish descent from the Taylor family of the Montrose area,^[9] with the former being rooted in Massachusetts Bay Colony; his ancestors include Edmund Rice, an English colonist who co-founded Sudbury, Massachusetts.^[10] His mother, Gertrude (née Woodard; 1921–2015), studied singing with Marie Sundelius at the New England Conservatory of Music and was an aspiring opera singer before she married Isaac in 1946.^[7][11] Taylor is the younger brother of musician Alex Taylor (1947–1993) and the older brother of musicians Kate Taylor (born 1949) and Livingston Taylor (born 1950).^[12] His youngest sibling, a brother named Hugh (born 1952), was also a musician; Hugh eventually left the music industry and has operated The Outermost Inn, a bed-and-breakfast in Aquinnah, Massachusetts, with his wife since 1989.^[12][13]


In 1951, Taylor and his family moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina,^[14] when Isaac took a job as an assistant professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine.^[15] They built a house in the Morgan Creek area off the present Morgan Creek Road, which was sparsely populated.^[16] James later said, "Chapel Hill, the Piedmont, the outlying hills, were tranquil, rural, beautiful, but quiet. Thinking of the red soil, caused by local copper mining [Taylor's later song, "Copperline" was a nostalgic salute to that area where Taylor grew up], plus 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."^[16] James attended a public primary school in Chapel Hill.^[7] 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.^[17] Isaac Taylor later rose to become dean of the UNC School of Medicine from 1964 to 1971.^[18] Beginning in 1953, the Taylors spent summers on Martha's Vineyard.^[19]


Taylor took cello lessons as a child in North Carolina, before learning the guitar in 1960.^[20] 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."^[21] Spending summer holidays with his family on Martha's Vineyard, he met Danny Kortchmar, an aspiring teenage guitarist from Larchmont, New York.^[22] The two began listening to and playing blues and folk music together, and Kortchmar felt that Taylor's singing had a "natural sense of phrasing, every syllable beautifully in time. I knew James had that thing."^[23] Taylor wrote his first song on guitar at 14, and he continued to learn the instrument effortlessly.^[21] By the summer of 1963, he and Kortchmar were playing coffeehouses around the Vineyard, billed as "Jamie & Kootch".^[24]


In 1961, Taylor went to Milton Academy, a preparatory boarding school in Massachusetts. He faltered during his junior year, feeling uneasy in the high-pressure college prep environment despite having a good scholastic performance.^[25] The Milton headmaster later said, "James was more sensitive and less goal-oriented than most students of his day."^[26] He returned home to North Carolina to finish out the semester at Chapel Hill High School.^[25] 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.^[25] Having lost touch with his former school friends in North Carolina, Taylor returned to Milton for his senior year,^[25] where he started applying to colleges to complete his education.^[27] But he felt part of a "life that [he was] unable to lead", and he became depressed; he slept 20 hours each day, and his grades collapsed.^[25][28] In late 1965 he committed himself to McLean, a psychiatric hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts,^[25] where he was treated with chlorpromazine, and where the organized days began to give him a sense of time and structure.^[26][28] 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.^[29] Taylor earned a high school diploma in 1966 from the hospital's associated Arlington School.^[29] He later viewed his nine-month stay at McLean as "a lifesaver... like a pardon or like a reprieve",^[28] and both his brother Livingston and his sister Kate later were patients and students there as well.^[26] As for his mental health struggles, Taylor thought of them as innate and said: "It's an inseparable part of my personality that I have these feelings."^[27]