1 Funding for the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program NEA Jazz Master interview was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts. BILLY TAYLOR NEA Jazz Master (1988) Interviewee: Dr. William E. Taylor (July 24, 1921 – December 28, 2010) Interviewer: Mr. Brown & Eugene Holly Date: November 19, 1993 Repository: Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution Description: Transcript, 122 pp. Brown: We will start. Today is Friday, November 19, 1993. We are in the home of Dr. Billy Taylor, pianist, composer, recording artist, arranger, conductor, actor, author, teacher, lecturer, radio and television personality, Dr. William Taylor. If there ever was a renaissance man I feel that I am in his presence right now. Good morning Dr. Taylor. I would hope that the next couple of days, we will be able to capture your over 50 plus years of your professional career, as all these various professions, as I have already enumerated. I would like to start the oral history by having you state your full name, date of birth, place and birth and talk about your family background. Taylor: Well my name is William Edward Taylor Junior. I am named after my father. When someone said William in my family in Washington D.C. or in North Carolina almost everybody head in the room turned. We had more Williams…it was the favorite family name I guess. So I am a junior. I was born in Greenville, North Carolina on July 24, 1921. And I lived…I thought I had lived in Greenville only a short time but my mother informed me that we actually lived in Greenville for about two or three years, then we moved to Raleigh. And my father and mother met when he was a dental student at Howard University. So when he graduated and married her, he started his dental practice in Greenville with his best For additional information contact the Archives Center at 202.633.3270 or [email protected] 2 friend who was a medical doctor, whose name was James Battle. So we lived there but my mother being a city girl didn’t like Greenville, which was a tiny tobacco town. You had to go through cornfield and tobacco field to get anywhere you were going. And she didn’t like that so much so she prevailed on him to move to…she said I want to go back to Washington. So he told her he would move her to a bigger town, so he moved her to Raleigh. We stayed there for about a year or so but she said no that’s not Washington D.C. so we moved back to Washington D.C. which was her home. He started his practice there and I grew up… I started school in Washington D.C. Actually I was in kindergarten in Raleigh I am told. I don’t remember that but…I just have vague members of both Raleigh and Greenville because I had many relatives on the Taylor side who still lived, in those days in North Carolina. And we would visit almost yearly. We would go back almost every year to visit someone. So most of the memories I have are confused with the visits as opposed to the time that I actually spent there because I was much to young. Brown: What was your mother’s maiden name and could you talk a little bit more about your extended family? Taylor: My mother’s name was Bacon. And she was…her family basically lived in Washington D.C. It was the Grayson family I believe…was the early family name, from her mother. Her father, Nathaniel Bacon was…I guess he was Pullman porter. I don’t know very much about my family on that side because my mother was very old when I had the presence of mind to ask her some questions about the family. I was asking her basically about her childhood in Washington D.C. So she had two brothers and a sister, there were four to them. And they all lived in Washington for a time then her older brother moved to New York. He was a dentist also and he moved to New York and established a family here. That part of my family was almost like…we were like brothers and sisters. Her sisters’ and brothers’ children were as close to me as my own brother. We are still very close, those who are left. A couple of them have passed away. So I have vague memories of growing up in Washington D.C. I have a younger brother whose name is Rudolph Antoine Taylor. My mother had lost a male child in between the two of us, so there is a five years difference in my age and my brother’s. I am the older. He, when we were young, we both took the mandatory piano lessons. My music teacher, Elmira Streets told my father in confidence that the younger son was probably going to do okay as a musician but the older one didn’t have a chance because he is not serious about his music and he keeps fooling around with everything that she gives him to work on, so he should find something else to do. Brown: What did she have you do? Was it traditional piano lessons? For additional information contact the Archives Center at 202.633.3270 or [email protected] 3 Taylor: Sure. We studied the, you know the Hannon and Bach and Mozart and the usual European piano tradition. And she was a very good teacher. I remember her explaining things very clearly and understanding what she said. But she was right, I really wasn’t interested. I wanted to be hip. I wanted to play some other kinds of music. The reason I asked for piano lessons, and the only reason my brother took it was because I was taking it, but the reason I asked for piano lessons was because I wanted to sound like one of my uncles on my father’s side. Everybody… many of the males in my family, even on my mother’s side played the piano. Everybody on my father’s side, played and sang. But my mother’s two brothers both played a little piano. Her brother in law, the man that her sister married, played a little piano by ear so I heard a lot of piano and different kinds of piano. It was mostly European classical music but… and church music because my grandfather on my father’s side was a Baptist minister and we spent a lot of time in the Baptist church. My father was choir director in his father’s church. His sisters and brothers all played the organ and the piano and so forth. Except for this one, actually two uncles. One was my Uncle Clint and my Uncle Bob both played jazz. Uncle Clint was a visual artist. He later became, after he finished art school and became a professional… he became the head of the art department at ANT College in Greensboro, North Carolina and was there for many years up until his death as the head of their art department. But he was… I didn’t hear him. He wasn’t as close… he lived with us a short time in Washington but then he moved away to go to art school and I would only see him periodically. On the other hand Uncle Bob, Robert Lee Taylor was like for me the hippest guy in the family. I mean he was a street guy. He knew everybody in Washington D.C. And he later became a newsman and became the assistant to one of the mayors of Washington on a political level. But he worked at the Y and he knew all the street people, all the nightclubs and all the folks that were doing things in the community, mover and shakers in the community on the grassroots level. So I just liked him, period. He played the piano so I wanted to do that. So I asked him to teach me. And he said, “No I am self taught. I just taught myself.” He has a record and he gave me my first Fats Waller record. So I fooled around with that and tried to take the stuff off of the record and it was hard. I didn’t have enough technical facility to do that. SO I began to try and practice a little on the piano and try to develop something. And I kept asking my dad if there wasn’t some jazz player that I could study with. Well he didn’t know anybody that was a jazz player, so I had to keep going back to Elmira Streets and a couple of other teachers that taught European classical music. I finally many years ago, many years after, after I had really learned to play a little jazz, discovered an old rag time piano player, named Louie Brown who was teaching but by the time I got… discovered him I was already… my ear had developed pretty well and I For additional information contact the Archives Center at 202.633.3270 or [email protected] 4 was taking stuff off in a more contemporary fashion. He was playing Stride piano and playing the old rag time things and did teach me a lot about rag time but I never really studied for very long. We became friends and he kind of gave me some informal lessons and a couple of formal lessons but mostly informal stuff.