James Taylor

James Vernon Taylor (born March 12, 1948) is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist. A five-time Grammy Award winner, Taylor was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000.

Taylor achieved his breakthrough in 1970 with the No. 3 single "Fire and Rain" and had his first No. 1 hit the following year with "You've Got a Friend", a recording of Carole King's classic song. His 1976 Greatest Hits album was certified Diamond and has sold 12 million US copies. Following his 1977 album, JT, he has retained a large audience over the decades. His commercial achievements declined slightly until a resurgence during the late 1990s and 2000s, when he recorded some of his best-selling and most-awarded work (including Hourglass, October Road and Covers). (read more at Wikipedia)

Links to Peel
James Taylor was the most commercially successful of the American singer-songwriters who emerged in the late 1960s. Peel played tracks from his early albums, particularly the eponymous debut album recorded in London for the Beatles' Apple label, and the critically acclaimed and commercially successful follow-up, Sweet Baby James. After that, however, the DJ became more critical of Taylor's output, at one point claiming that the work of Joni Mitchell (who had shared the billing on a 1970 Radio 1 In Concert programme, introduced by Peel, in 1970) had "disintegrated into a James Taylor-like welter of self-pity and self-indulgence." Peel was not alone in his criticism of Taylor's work; in the rock press there was a reaction against the singer, who was seen as epitomising everything that had gone wrong with pop music in the early 1970s. The critic Lester Bangs, an early champion of punk, and of Peel favourites such as Captain Beefheart, even wrote a notorious article (in praise of The Troggs) in which he stated he would like to kill James Taylor.

It is not surprising that Peel played no James Taylor tracks in his later shows, but the singer became a lasting favourite of Bob Harris. In his autobiography, Harris recalls visiting the home of Taylor and his then wife Carly Simon on Martha's Vineyard in 1976 to interview them for the Old Grey Whistle Test, before returning to Britain to be confronted with the onset of punk.

Sessions

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Other Shows Played
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 * DD Month YYYY: Song (single/album) Label