taylor family: generations of blues
BY:LARRY TAYLOR WITH BONNI MCKEOWN
On May 4, 2023, when I walked into Joyride Studio at Chicago Avenue and Sacramento, not far from where I live on the West Side, I really didn’t know what would happen. With three guys from my band, I was going to play music behind a rap song.
My son Abdullah, known as Liljet 2x, had written a positive rap called “No Shine” about his life growing up in the hood. The song is like a memorial. His mother Janice Myles died 10 years ago, and we all still hurt from that. His brother Pierre was shot dead last year. Before that, his sister TooSweet died suddenly. You just don’t get over these things.
A lot of musicians I used to play with are gone too, like Killer Ray Allison and Sleepy Riley who play guitar and bass on our new Taylor family album Generations of Blues. Others are down sick and not able to play. I worry that the real blues won’t be around after I’m gone, unless people make a serious effort to get it back. When my son wrote, “it’s a dark, dark place that I’m from” I felt that.
Our music being from different generations, I had no idea how to put it together. A paperwork crisis had forced us into the studio. The music rights to the “beat,” the backing track Dullah used in his first “No Shine” recording try in 2017, were bought by a big rapper who did not make it easy to license. So Sallie Bengtson, owner of Nola-Blue records, who loved “No Shine,” told us to put new music behind it. She had a deadline to finish our family CD for release June 16. And it needed to be done in 2023—the 100th birthday year of Eddie Taylor Sr. We had to act fast to make sure the new CD repped all three generations.
Both Dullah and I had the same idea—get my band to make up the music. But actually doing it was something else. Being a drummer, I know rhythms well. I couldn’t hear in my head how my son’s rap rhythm was going to fit with a blues riff. Dullah was just a little nervous, but he’s grown into a confident man at age 23. He walked into the studio and greeted everyone like he owned the place. The studio engineer, Brian Leach, was excited. He recorded and mixed the rest of our Taylor family songs in 2015 and 2017, including four that I wrote and two each by my sisters Brenda and Demetria based on our mom and dad’s work. Brian couldn’t wait to set up the mic’s and see how this live-band rap—the first in Joyride history-- was gonna work.
At least I had some great musicians with me. My West Side buddy Abraham, on bass, played with Bobby Rush, Johnny Dollar, and Johnny Christian. We used to play together on the road with Vance Kelly and A.C. Reed. Ice Mike, on guitar, knows a huge variety of music. He played with Mississippi Heat, Dancin’ Perkins, Lacey Gibson, Willie James, and recently with Latimore. Dancin’ Perkins and Mike were in the 1980s Japanese video that showed Eddie Taylor, Maxwell Street and the Delta Fish Market. Mike and I and others in our generation continued to play on Maxwell Street until the city shamefully tore most of the stores down in the late 1990s.
The keyboard player in the band this year, Kevin Stover, is a church organist and jazz composer from a whole different world of urban Black music. But he has sons who rap, and he knows how to find the feeling in the blues.
To kick off the session, we asked Dullah to read us the whole rap poem to scope out his story and the mood. Barrelhouse Bonni, my partner and co-producer, started fooling with an A minor riff on the piano. Dullah tried to sing the theme of his rap to it and found B minor a more comfortable key. Abraham tweaked the riff into a funky bass line. I asked Kevin to play some music behind it. He put in a solid organ note. “It’s just two chords,” he figured out.
I got on the drums, hit the sticks using my backbeat, and off we went. Mike played guitar licks that sounded like Wes Montgomery or George Benson. We nailed the basic tune in about three takes. Then Brian, the engineer, told us to get around a mic and sing while he made loops out of the chorus led by Dullah: “The sun don’t shine where I’m from; It’s a dark dark life where I’m from…I’m from the slums.” Kevin added the drawn-out response “no shiiiine…,no, no” In less than two hours, we had ourselves a rap/R&B song with a blues flavor to it.
I felt so grateful I couldn’t stop smiling. The Creator helped our team arrange that song! I know God loves to create many things. Look at all the birds, the trees, and animals-- the lions, the elephants, even the worms, the squirrels and the cats in the neighborhood. God loves when we create something positive that brings people together. I could feel my dad and mom’s spirits in the room encouraging me, like I sometimes do with the blues ancestors. I know they would’ve been proud.
Black history on the West Side goes back to the early 20th century, to a neighborhood near the city’s open market on Maxwell Street. Then the post-World War II Great Migration brought a whole new wave of working people from the cottonfields of the South to the factories of the North, and many settled to work on the West Side. Up and down the east-west main streets of the South and West Sides, Black people set up businesses, including lots of little blues and jazz lounges. The Delta Fish Market, where Oliver Davis sold and served catfish trucked up from Mississippi, had a live blues stage. Fans would come from all over the world.
Eddie Taylor was a master guitarist in that generation who brought the music from Mississippi to Chicago. He recorded for VeeJay and played with Jimmy Reed. He played on a lot of records with people like John Lee Hooker. Eddie was the king of the blues “lump” rhythm and the boogie. The late Clifford Antone, from the club in Austin, Texas where our family played an Eddie Taylor 100th birthday show in January, called our dad a father of rock’n’roll. Eddie Sr. really belongs in the Rock Hall of Fame. The Rolling Stones covered his song “Ride’ em on Down” on their Blue and Lonesome album in 2016.
One day when I was two years old, playing in the sand in Douglass Park on the West Side, harp player Dusty Brown introduced Eddie Taylor to my mother, Vera, and they got together. She was a natural blues singer and wrote songs, a lot of them under Eddie’s name.
Eddie and Vera never had it easy. He was doing well with his music in the 1950s, even making good money in the North Side clubs into the 1980s, but he never really got recognized as the master and star that he was. Our family had to move a lot, sometimes to dangerous housing projects. Once we got evicted and I had to guard our stuff out on the street.
In 1985 Eddie Sr. had a contract to do music for Richard Pryor’s movie JoJo Dancer. But on Christmas Day, he died. He never got to be everything he was meant to be or get the rewards coming to him.
Out of Eddie and Vera’s eight children, seven of us turned out to be talented in music, and five have been professionals. Myself, the oldest, on drums and vocals; Tim on drums, Eddie Jr. on guitar and vocals, and Brenda, Edna and Demetria, vocals. All are featured on Eddie’s recordings with Wolf Records. Edna, with her sweet voice, sang in church and has started to sing blues more often now. Another sister Valicia, who is deceased, had a beautiful voice too. Milton, our baby brother, is a big fan and promotes our parents’ names.
Brenda, the oldest Taylor sister born eight years after me in 1963, remembers a lot of stuff from back in the day. The time our family got evicted, Big Duke, who owned a record shop and a club at Roosevelt and California, put us up temporarily in the attic over top of the club. There was a hole in the roof and Brenda and I watched through it to see Howlin’ Wolf performing with our parents. Wolf, Muddy Waters, Elmore James, Jimmy Reed, Hubert Sumlin—all of them would come visit, wherever we were staying. That’s why I named my first album They Were in This House on my own AV label. It was reissued by Wolf Records in 2011, with a picture of the apartment building I grew up in with my mother and grandmother Inez Burns, 1131 S. Mozart Street. We will never forget how it felt to be around these southern elders.
Besides Brenda’s powerful singing, which sounds something like our mother, she promotes the memory of our parents. She sells T-shirts, coffee and other souvenirs with her Purple Octave Publishing and Eddie Taylor Foundation, including her booth at the Chicago Blues Fest. Her CD Buggy Ride was issued by Wolf Records in 2021, featuring Eddie Jr. and Tim, plus guitarist Illinois Slim, Freddie Dixon on bass, and Harmonica Hinds. Brenda’s written more songs, including some rap pieces, and is planning another CD soon.
Tim, born in 1965, is a drummer with a straight-ahead style you can count on. I taught him to play on the back porch of my first apartment when he was just a kid. Over the years he’s played on over 70 records, including tracks by Bonnie Lee, Willie Kent, Johnny B. Moore, Boston Blackie, Jewtown Jimmy Davis, Big Smokey Smothers, Eddie Shaw, John Brim, and Pinetop Perkins. Fans know Tim best in his travels with the bands of Maurice John Vaughn and the late Willie Kent and Eddie Shaw. In the 2020s, he’s played with my band and Brenda’s.
We really lost a lot when our brother Eddie Jr. died of kidney disease in 2019. He didn’t make it to his 47th birthday. He played most of the songs on our album Generations of Blues. Eddie Jr. was about the best young traditional blues guitarist in Chicago, knew all our dad’s songs plus he could play the slide and sound like Robert Johnson or John Lee Hooker.
The funny thing is, Eddie Jr. didn’t have any interest in playing guitar til after Eddie Sr. died in 1985. When my brother did take up guitar at the age of 12, he made awful racking noises, but musician friends told our mother he’d sound great if he stuck with it. They were right. Our uncle Willie Charles Burns, brother of guitar players Eddie and Jimmy Burns, practiced playing bass with Eddie while I played drums. Sometimes we’d take Eddie to clubs where he could sit in and learn. Little Arthur Duncan, the harmonica player, let us have a rehearsal in his Artesia club on West Madison. It sounded good. People started coming in the club raving, “who’s that?” and Arthur gave Eddie his first band gig, right on the spot. Eddie Jr. was best known in Chicago for his solo or duo acoustic shows for lunch and dinner at Buddy Guy’s Legends. They just didn’t seem to want to give him a gig with a band.
Our youngest sister Demetria has succeeded in the mainstream blues business and knows how to put her show across. Coming up, she learned to play drums. She’s sung with her band in many national and international festivals and has regular gigs in downtown Chicago clubs. Delmark Records issued her first album, Bad Girl, and Blues Foundation’s Music Awards nominated her in 2012 for Best New Debut Artist. Ten years later, Delmark released her CD Doin’ What I’m Supposed to Do, featuring Mike Wheeler and his band. Jus’Blues Foundation in Atlanta gave Demetria the “Queen of the Blues” award in August 2022, named for Koko Taylor, not a direct relative but a family friend who inspired and mentored Demetria. Though nearly 20 years younger than me, she remembers the many blues greats and friends of the family who came by the house-- Floyd Jones, Carey Bell, Sunnyland Slim, Johnny Littlejohn, Sam Lay, Willie Kent, Tail Dragger, Eddie Shaw, Johnny B. Moore and Magic Slim.
Me, I did get one award so far—an Esteemed Artist award from the city Dept. of Culture and Special Events for 2020-21. I’m known as the Ambassador of West Side Blues. We apply for grants to perform in free community venues, like last summer in Austin Town Hall Park. Austin is the farthest-west neighborhood on the West Side. My band, the Soul Blues Healers, was hired by the nonprofit BUILD for two months of peacemaking shows in 2018 at Hubbard Park, a little playground troubled with drug and gang fights. Growing up on the streets, I understand places like that.
Grandparents in the houses around Hubbard Park heard our blues and soul music. They brought out their little grandkids, and pretty soon the teens showed up too, shooting basketball. I brought some young kids on stage to try their rap rhymes. Nonprofit groups served hotdogs and soft drinks. It turned into a big family picnic and everybody had fun. Even the cops.
Blues doesn’t let us forget the hard times we’ve had as Black people, but it’s a peaceful music that makes you feel good. It brings people together. That’s what I want to do. Now we have our fourth Black mayor, Brandon Johnson, our neighbor a few blocks away. I want to see more blues happen here on the West Side and in all of Chicago.
Larry Taylor: larry@larrytaylorchicagoblues.com
Bonni McKeown barrelhbonni@yahoo.com
773-209-4712
