Even before he picked up a guitar and learned to play the blues, Eddie Taylor Jr. knew he was different from his west-side peers. “I was an old-fashioned guy from the get-go,” he says. “I never could dance. I wanted to be a rapper, but I never could be one.”
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“First thing I heard was blues,” he says, remembering the music Eddie Sr. used to play around the house. “Old stuff–Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton, Son House, Robert Nighthawk. He used to have a reel-to-reel he used to play and record, work on his songs. Lots of musicians came around the house. I didn’t want to hear that type of stuff. I was embarrassed at everything: the clothes he wore–he used to wear them bell-bottoms and stuff–just, you know, like an image thing. During his life, I was into something else.” His dad bought him “some deejay stuff,” and he owned some drums.
It came slowly. It took Taylor almost two years to learn how to tune his instrument, and that happened only because John Primer borrowed it one day and had to retune it to play it. No one except his mother–not his father’s contemporaries, not the younger bluesmen who’d come by to visit and play with his brothers–raised a hand to help him. “It was kinda hard. When everybody saw I was interested in playing, they thought it was a joke, you know?”
Earlier this year Taylor was diagnosed with high blood pressure and kidney failure. He went into the hospital on Father’s Day and stayed for two months. “Had seven operations. I was in intensive care for four days, on the life-support machine. I’ll never forget, the doctor sat next to me and told me I was gonna die. I had faith, and I was fighting to the end.”
