Johnnie Taylor I'm Changing
Johnnie Taylor Soul Heaven Video
Johnnie Taylor Soul Heaven Lyrics
Johnnie Taylor Soul Heaven Lyrics
Johnnie Taylor Soul Heaven Live

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People also search for. View credits, reviews, tracks and shop for the 2000 CD release of 'Soul Heaven' on Discogs. Johnnie Taylor Soul Heaven (1999) Old School Music Lounge posted a video to playlist Blues. September 20, 2019 Johnnie Taylor Soul Heaven (1999). Johnnie Taylor was born May 5, 1938 in Crawford, Arkansas, just across the Mississippi River from Memphis, Tennessee. Download postinstall folder high sierra. He was schooled in gospel quartets and eventually joined the Soul Stirrers as the legendary Sam Cooke's handpicked replacement. View credits, reviews, tracks and shop for the 1999 CD release of 'Gotta Get The Groove Back' on Discogs.

Floyd Taylor, the son of the late blues and soul legend Johnnie Taylor has died at the age of sixty-years-old, according to a family friend.

Taylor, a Blues singer, had recently been touring with other musical acts across the country. His next show was slated for March 15, 2014 in Merrillville, Indiana at the Town Blues Festival.

The Taylor family has not officially commented on his death.

Story still developing.

In the meantime, check out a performance of Floyd singing with his father Johnnie back in the day above.

'Soul Heaven'

Johnnie Taylor

August 1, 2020:
Listen to a fantastic new documentary/video on Johnnie Taylor's career!
--Daddy B. Nice
July 14, 2019:

Top Of The Charts

Readers of Daddy B. Nice's Guide to Ronnie Lovejoy know that for the past year and a half I have relegated Johnnie Taylor to the #2 Southern Soul Artist so that I could right a perceived wrong and feature Lovejoy's 'Sho' Wasn't Me' as the #1 Song in Southern Soul. Which it is. But that experiment, I think, has run its course. It's time to reinstate Taylor in the #1 spot of the Top 100 Southern Soul Artists chart where everyone intimate with southern soul knows he belongs. In doing so, 'Soul Heaven' moves back into the #1 spot on the Top 100 Southern Soul Songs chart, upending the more deserving 'Sho' Wasn't Me,' which I shall continue to headline as the '#1 Song in Southern Soul' on the Ronnie Lovejoy page.
--Daddy B. Nice
See Johnnie Taylor Artist Guide
See Ronnie Lovejoy Artist Guide for the back-story.
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See 'Tidbits' below for the latest updates on Johnnie Taylor.
Also included: Daddy B. Nice's 'Johnnie Taylor Did It All Before' (Tidbit #4) and. . .
'ON THE IMPORTANCE OF BIG HEAD HUNDREDS (Which could have and should have been just the beginning of a new phase in Johnnie Taylor's career.)' (Tidbit #1)
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To automatically link to Johnnie Taylor's charted radio singles, awards, CD's and many other references on the website, go to 'Taylor, Johnnie' in Daddy B. Nice's Comprehensive Index.
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Daddy B. Nice's Original Critique

Listen to Johnnie Taylor singing 'Soul Heaven' on YouTube.
When Disco conquered the R&B world in the seventies, it obliterated the two strains of classic soul--Detroit/Philly in the North and Memphis/Muscle Shoals in the South--that had between them made Rhythm & Blues a fixture of popular music. Soul music fell into a 'dark age' from which it has never recovered.
Disco acts (Michael Jackson, Kool & The Gang, Earth Wind & Fire, etc.) borrowed far more heavily from the Northern strain, which had always favored a slicker, more orchestral sound. Southern Soul, on the other hand, fell upon hard times, and its flagship artists--Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, Al Green, Clarence Carter, Bobby Bland, Joe Simon and others--disappeared from the best-seller charts and the public consciousness. Johnnie Taylor was one of those artists--artists, in other words, who spent a major portion of their careers in a virtual musical apartheid.
This, then, is the irony of Johnnie Taylor's career. On the one hand, he was an artist frustrated and embittered by nearly twenty years of neglect by the mainstream music industry. On the other, he was an artist so beloved and envied by his core audience and peers that a press release by his longtime record company, Malaco Records, says Taylor 'was a flame that melted the wax on most wings daring to draw close.'
How did Johnnie Taylor walk the tightrope between those two extremes? How did he maintain his dignity and equilibrium? How did he keep his eye on his aesthetic vision? We know he did, because in the years after he joined Jackson, Mississippi's Malaco Records, he released one album after another that defined the direction for all Southern Soul blues artists to come. Along the way he fulfilled the promise of his early work.
What was that promise? That somewhere out of the ravaged R&B wasteland left by the successive invasions of disco, funk, rap and hiphop, a musician would come slouching toward Jackson with the promise of a rhythm and blues renaissance.

Johnnie Taylor I'm Changing

Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Aretha Franklin, Bobby 'Blue' Bland. . . When one thinks of the greatest vocalists of the last half-century, it is impossible to overlook Taylor's place among them. Not only has he recorded more rhythm and blues standards than any other artist--he has done so in infinitely varied ways.
Taylor's vocals conjure at different times the precision and wit of a surgeon's scalpel, the passion and scruffiness of a street balladeer, the slickness and pomp of a king's court, or the lilting innocence of a young lover. Whatever the technique, it's rendered with seemingly effortless grace.

--Daddy B. Nice

About Johnnie Taylor

Johnnie Taylor was born May 5, 1938 in Crawford, Arkansas, just across the Mississippi River from Memphis, Tennessee. He was schooled in gospel quartets and eventually joined the Soul Stirrers as the legendary Sam Cooke's handpicked replacement.
His first great successes came in the late sixties and early seventies after he hooked up with the Motown-schooled producer Don Davis at Stax Records on such early tracks as 'Who's Makin' Love' and 'I Believe In You (You Believe In Me).' Taylor's southern-grit vocal style and Davis' Motown-style horns and female choruses made for a knockout blend of urban and rural soul. More pioneering soul hits (most notably 'Disco Lady,' 'Jody's Got Your Girl And Gone' and 'Steal Away') continued in the early seventies until Stax went bankrupt in 1975, ending an era.
Unfortunately, the sound never caught on. It remains one of the mysteries (and tragedies) of modern rhythm and blues, and Johnnie Taylor's career went into a mainstream commercial eclipse for the better part of two decades. Meanwhile, his 1976 recording of 'Disco Lady' sold over two million copies, making him a full-fledged if ambivalent star of the dance music scene.
The birth of Tommy Couch's Malaco Records, a record company devoted to classic soul and to the artistic vision of such heavy-hitting, behind-the-scenes songwriter/producers as Harrison Calloway and Frederick Knight, became the pivotal event in Johnnie Taylor's career.
Along with his Malaco collaborators, Taylor soldiered on through the R&B-hostile eighties and the increasingly soul-friendly nineties, producing records that effectively seeded the air waves of the Deep South audience still loyal to the old-fashioned, adult-R&B sound, inspiring virtually all the future soul artists who make up the Southern Soul scene today.
Along the way, the hits--'Last Two Dollars,' 'Wall To Wall,' 'When She Stops Askin',' 'You Can't Strike Gold (In A Silver Mine),' 'Good Love,' 'Electric Slide,' 'Please Sign On The Dotted Line,' 'We're Getting Careless With Our Love'--just kept coming, each seemingly more potent and pleasurable than the last.
But the album that more than any other gave birth to present-day Southern Soul was Malaco's Gotta Get The Groove Back. In addition to 'Big Head Hundreds' and 'Too Close For Comfort,' which were Deep South radio blockbusters for years following their release, the song 'Soul Heaven' gained a permane