By Adam Perry – December 21, 2023
Colorado bluesman Otis Taylor, a Chicago native, remembers being at the Rolling Stones’ legendary Hyde Park concert in London back in 1969, but it wasn’t the music he found particularly interesting.
“I didn’t care — I was just chasing girls at the time. I was just doing my miniskirt tour,” he admits. “I didn’t really care that the Rolling Stones were on stage. Thousands of people and all these hot chicks, and I’m, like, ‘Fuck.’ I just had a different attitude about it, but I always had an attitude about that until I got married.”
Taylor, who has been married for 38 years and has two kids, once even ghosted seminal singer-songwriter Mississippi Fred McDowell on a lesson in favor of a date. But after decades of doing everything from selling antiques to coaching a Boulder-area bike-racing team to make a living, Taylor finally released his first album, Blue-Eyed Monster, in 1996, and by the turn of the millennium, he’d found international acclaim with his signature trance-blues style and was able to make music his main focus.
“I was starting to tour,” he says, “but it was a hard transition, ’cause you gotta feed your family.”
But Taylor’s lack of formal musical education was key in developing his trance blues, which beautifully and poignantly accompany his stark, sometimes brutal lyrics about the minority experience. “I was kind of handicapped,” he explains. “I couldn’t bar on the guitar, and technically, my right hand’s okay, but I couldn’t do certain things. So I just got into rhythmical things. … Technically, I’m not a very good guitar player. I’m a performer; I’m a magician — that’s what I tell people. I have a way of making people think I can play music.”
If Taylor works in magic at all, it’s through his ability to make something truly unique, with intelligent, racially conscious lyrics over harsh, repetitive and alluring blues. “My lyrics are very, my wife says, cryptic. But then they resonate with people,” Taylor says. “So you get this weird combination…and it works, that’s all. And as long as I play Otis, I can make money. If I play anything else, it’s not going to make me money.”
As far as his guitar work goes, it’s somewhere between one-chord folk-blues songwriters who play the instrument like they’re charming a snake and the hypnotic drone of early Velvet Underground. That’s another “magic trick,” Taylor says. “I’m not doing anything. It’s not how many notes you play, it’s what notes you play. When I have my Trance Blues Festival, I tell that to my students: ‘It’s not how many notes; it’s how you play that note, how you make that note sound.’ Sometimes you hear guitar players that play a lot of notes, but it does nothing for you. It’s the holes, too, that make the syncopation.”
Taylor’s jammy trance-blues version of “Hey Joe” (made famous by Jimi Hendrix but written by Billy Roberts) has more than 3.5 million views on YouTube (and there are another two other videos of him playing that song with 2.2 million views and 900,000-plus views). But it’s his breathtaking original, “Resurrection Blues,” that tops them all, with 10 million YouTube views. Starting off with just Taylor’s voice and an acoustic guitar, “Resurrection Blues” slowly gets deep, dark and into trance blues, the music perfectly juxtaposed with lyrics about a man who’s about to be crucified. “I don’t want to crucified,” Taylor sings. “I don’t want to walk among the dead. I don’t want to be Jesus.”
Much like his guitar playing, Taylor repeats himself when he sings, and with great effect. He calls “Resurrection Blues” — from 2001’s White African — “really, really heavy,” and says, “I didn’t play it [live] for a long time because I thought it was too dark for people.”
“I was raised Lutheran, which is a whole other story, at a Swedish Lutheran church, but my grandfather was a Baptist minister,” he continues. “I became a Unitarian by the time I was fifteen, so I’m not that religious that way, but I still have the traces of that from childhood. I was just into this heavy sort of — at that time, that album period — just a couple of really deep religious sort of songs, even though I’m not religious. It’s a dark album, White African.”
Taylor’s most recent album, Banjo…, is his fifteenth. It was recorded locally for the fidelity-minded Octave Records and traverses trance-blues paths, from the wicked groove of “1964” to the Chicago blues of “See My Face.” The lyrics continue Taylor’s history of outspoken, brash and socially conscious poetry, which he says has roots all the way back to his childhood. “I don’t do drugs. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. My parents were beboppers — they drank; they did drugs. My mother went to jail for selling heroin; I wrote a song about it,” he says. “I came from a really subterranean lifestyle.
“That’s why I lived in Boulder, because I could raise a family here, and being Black, I wouldn’t get hassled as much,” he continues. “That’s why I came here, and it worked fairly well. There’s always racism, because people come from all over. Racism could leave, but there will always be classism, because that’s just a human instinct — somebody wants to be higher up on the mountain so they can piss down on you. The upper class talks about it. They love talking about it. That’s what makes them the upper class.
“I have a saying: ‘There’s classical music for the upper class, and there’s folk music for the people.’”
Taylor’s upcoming performance at Denver jazz club Dazzle on Thursday, December 28, is a rare appearance for him. He says he’s in the midst of slowing down, though the word “retirement” seems off-limits. But he knows that he won’t tour Europe ever again, and is “scaling it down” in general.
“My wife said there’d never be a second album,” Taylor notes, and laughs. “But fifteen albums later…she tells me it’s her time now to do things. She’s proud of me; I’ve had a lot of accolades — ended up in the African American Museum of Music in Nashville, Sundance Fellow, movies. It’s not retirement; I’ve just got to see what my body’s going to do. I won’t know for a little while, then we’ll see. No big deal. I’m 75, you know?
“It’s funny, the psychology of it,” he adds. “Musicians are supposed to last until you stop playing, until you can’t play anymore. And I might still be like that, but I just have to see. I have to see when I’ll play my last song. You like that? It sounds poetic. I don’t know when I’m going to play my last song, I guess.”
OTIS TAYLOR 