It was the mid-fifties, and Cooke was still singing with the Soul Stirrers, a group founded in Texas but based in Chicago whose early members were the fathers of the modern gospel quartet sound. The pair spent afternoons singing together at Cooke’s house on the south side of Chicago, and Taylor’s lead on the Q.C.’s “Somewhere to Lay My Head” sounded so much like Cooke that it was eerie. (TAG stands for “Taylor and God.”)Īlong with gospel music, Sam Cooke proved to be the other recurring motif in his early career, though Taylor quickly grows impatient talking about him today. As a five-year-old in Arkansas he would hit the road singing behind a preacher, and he has been in and out of the ministry several times. Gospel has always been a natural for Taylor.
At sixteen he was invited to join the Highway Q.C.’s, a journeyman gospel group that once included Cooke. But he soon opted for Chicago, where he formed a new group, the Five Echoes, and released a single that was locally popular. At age ten, he joined his mother in Kansas City, Missouri, and he got his first taste of the good life when his gospel group, the Melody Masters, opened for Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers. There was lots of work here, and I needed a good place to bring up the last two of my six children.” He was born in Crawfordsville, Arkansas, in 1938 and raised in nearby West Memphis, where bluesman Junior Parker lived just a couple of streets away and stars like Howlin’ Wolf and Rufus Thomas had their own radio shows. Taylor first came to Dallas in 1963 “for a weekend engagement,” he says, “and I wound up just staying. He answers questions tersely but without evasion, like a man used to being in charge. His tenth album for Malaco-the aptly titled Taylored to Please, which includes a remix of “Disco Lady”-was released just days earlier, but if he has any jitters about not matching the success of Good Love!, they don’t show. The stones on his rings are the size of walnuts. It is a Friday in late April, and he is sitting behind his desk at TAG, smoking a cigarette and wearing cream-colored slacks and a lime-green “silk on silk” shirt that could make your eyes melt and pour out of their sockets. “Southern blacks are incredibly loyal,” Taylor says with a smile and a shrug. And since 1984 he has settled into a comfortable groove at Malaco Records, a Jackson, Mississippi, outfit that thrives by sticking to Southern blues, rhythm and blues, and gospel at a time when those genres are mostly shunned by other labels. His 1976 hit for Columbia, “Disco Lady”-which, despite its subject matter, did not have a disco sound-was the first record ever designated as platinum, signifying sales of more than two million copies. and the MGs, the unsung Taylor is its best-selling artist. In 1968 his single “Who’s Makin’ Love” pumped new life into Stax Records, a label that defined soul music but was going through uncertain times though Stax is better known for such household names as Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, the Staple Singers, and Booker T. He was among the first generation of black singers (following his mentor Sam Cooke) to leave gospel music for rhythm and blues. For that matter, the trim sixty-year-old has been little recognized for most of his career, even though he has been at or around the heart of black music for four decades now, taking part in some of its greatest changes. The anonymous setting is not a bad symbol for Taylor himself, a man who attracts hardly any attention even though his 1996 album, Good Love!, a collection of mature ballads for the black generation that grew up on blues and then soul music, has sold more than 400,000 copies. The only clue that something out of the ordinary might go on here is a black and red tour bus sitting out back. Thornton Freeway in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of South Dallas, just across the interstate from the Dallas Zoo. THE OFFICES OF TAG ENTERPRISES-where soul-blues singer Johnnie Taylor conducts his business affairs-are in a small, nondescript wood house on the access road alongside R.