Where is fingers taylor

I was in Wichita basically until I was fourteen years old. There was a guy named Mike Finnigan who played the organ, who was my hero. Played the B3 Organ. I used to go see him play all the time. They played the Cotillion Ballroom there. Before I moved from Wichita, I became a big Beatles fan. I had me and my two compadres: Dave and Dan. We tried everything to meet girls. We joined the track team. We began to hear these Beatles guys, the Dave Clark Five, and a lot of the English invasion bands on the radio.

You know what I mean? So, I was hearing that, especially the Dave Clark Five. They had a sax player; they had a real big sound. The drums were turned up loud, and I liked that. So, I formed a band with my guys and we met girls and we had fun. Somewhere in there, when I was about fifteen or sixteen I started listening to Blues records.

There were two of them. I just loved the way the music sounded, got deep off into the blues. I ended up in Jackson, Mississippi. I was fourteen when we moved. I was so excited because I was going to where the Delta Blues came from.

To the Mississippi Delta, right around Jackson, Mississippi. Anyway, I learned to love the Blues. I started a little blues band when I was in high school in Jackson. Just sort of went from there. The instrument that I really liked to hear was the harmonica. I thought it was a very expressive instrument and it was a little different. And also at one of the battle of the bands we had, the guy in the band that won blew a little harmonica and drove everybody crazy just by the sound of it.

Once I got down to college at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, I was pretty well blowing the harmonica all the time, and I carried it around with me. But then I largely became a harmonica player, so I kind of got the wrong name.

Down at Southern, I learned how to play the harp. I sat around in like the stairwells on the weekend at the University. I would play and practice and I formed a little band down there and just one thing lead to another. By that point I was jamming with a lot of the groups that came through at Southern, at the big coliseum we had there.

I got up on the big stage for the first time, and so then I was definitely hooked. Buffett was playing that night at the Union Building, one night and I sat down and there were three little old ladies on break from night class and that was it…and Buffett with a big ten-gallon hat on, and back then he had lots of hair. We all did. Anyway we hooked up over the next week. He had a weeklong gig there and I started playing every night with him and by the third or fourth night we were selling the house out.

We kind of realized that we had something together that neither one of us had apart, and that it was a good combination. He wanted somebody who could play more solos. He was never a solo guitar player. So I took up the lead spots on the harmonica. More time ensued. I went back to Little Rock. Jimmy eventually wound up in Nashville. We were on Stacks Records and we did one album.

Stacks, was unfortunately getting ready to go bankrupt, by the time we hooked up with the company. Started up in about , was when we first hit the road. We toured the United States, had a ball, played with a lot of great musicians. We almost, kind of, made it big. Stacks like I said, was going under. Meanwhile, Jimmy and I had kept up with each other and I had gone on a few gigs with him.

Acoustic gigs, just the two of us, while I was still in school at Southern. No matter where I was, time for a new album, he would fly me into Nashville. And I got to play with all the great Nashville players, Vassar Clements, just a bunch of great players. So, anyway in about or late , the High Steppers were about to breakup, Stacks was going under, the record company. But Buffett was just getting cranked up.

I got a bus. And it had bunks in it so we could sleep and just keep moving. So I quit college all together and hit the highway. I took a couple of breaks, at points, just to get off the road, and get my health back every now and then.

At any rate, I continued to just pursue the harmonica in a whole lot of different ways. The guy who really made a difference for me and for a lot of other Chicago-style Harmonica players was a guy named Little Walter Jacobs. I totally got off into Little Walter. Nobody ever really beat what he did in the Fifties. He was actually a star back then, which was unusual for a harmonica player to be a big star. At any rate, it just kept on rolling and I worked on Buffett through many, many more albums.

I decided to leave him in to be with my family. I had two new baby boys. I just wanted to be home more. I think Jimmy and I were both a little tired of each other. It was a good time to take a break. Just recently I went back and played with Buffett for the first time since I did a show with him in Cincinnati, at Riverbend Coliseum. He has some things he wants to talk to me about.

That may happen. What do you want to ask me? Ask me questions. PAUL: All right. Well, I wanted to ask you, what is it that you think makes the blues, the blues? I told you this in Key West one time, your music has gotten me into a lot of trouble, in the past. I think that I identified with the soul and feeling that is involved in that music. I love the simplicity of it. The expressiveness. When I was still fourteen and fifteen, I went through kind of a traumatic time, with a girlfriend of mine.

I felt really down. When I listened to the blues records, I felt better. So I said, hmm, this is kind of cool. I guess I was trying to drown in my own sorrow or something, but then later I began to appreciate the blues as a happy music.

I want to get up and dance, I want to have fun, I want to blow my harp. I want to listen to the blues, dance to the blues. You and Keith are buddies. And he certainly is a hell of a songwriter.

So tell me about Keith. It was a real special time; it was like being a cave man again. You wanted to go around in a loin cloth Roars. We made a lot of good music down there. It was a real inspiring place. They were having a songwriter convention. So we all ran into each other and Keith and I played together for the first time in many years, just the two of us.

It was great, we had a ball. One of the great songwriters. And a great Memphian. And he could be a real rocker too. He did some rocking stuff. A lot of his solo records were rock and roll records.

Still a great songwriter. He brought the song in, and we cut it in one take. I had done it a couple of different ways. The one that Keith produced has never really truly been released. Anyways, Sykes is fine. I think Buffett is maybe coming down. Tim entered the Coral Reefer Band about I had been hanging out with him in Nashville some, so I knew who he was and I talked Buffett into hiring him. He was a great asset to the band, a great rocker.

Tim and I are actually playing together in a couple weekends at a blues festival over in Kentucky. Have a little fun for a couple of days. He still writes a lot of songs in Nashville.

Got him a hit! What do you like? Of course I like the blues and soul and funk. I just listen to a lot of stuff. I listen to a lot of hillbilly music, white country music, very old timey stuff. I love bluegrass. I can identify with that. In fact when I was in college for a while, way back, at the University of Little Rock, my first brother-in-law to be was a banjo picker. All the great bluegrass players from miles around would come every Saturday and play at the courthouse on the lawn.

So I got into bluegrass, learned how to play all that kind of stuff. You know, I still go back and listen to the blues a lot. Geils Band. Great harmonica player. Also another great harmonica player from the west coast named Mark Hummel, and his band are going to be the backing band. The three of us are going to do a couple of shows in that part of the country. PAUL: As far as harmonica players go, as a blues harp player, who would you have to give the respect to?

An incredible harp player. We were talking earlier about Howard Levy, he is just a monster harmonica player. He over-blows, sort of like the guy in Blues Traveler, John Popper.

Levy can take it and walk it up all the way. But Levy, bends them on the bottom and probably gets two or three scales out of one tiny blues harp. I told you the story about hearing the guy blow the harp at the battle of the bands. Later on I got so tire of lifting big B3 organs and pianos upstairs so that we could go play. That was before we had portable stuff. It became a lot easier for me just to stick that harmonica in my pocket. I could practice anytime I wanted.

It was easy, it was portable. Kim Wilson produced my last record. We did that in Ann Arbor and I might fly him into Nashville to produce part of this one. The money has been good, which we all need, as players. I have to think about it and do this and that. Plus, I know a lot of the songwriters in Nashville. I need to go in there and write some more of my own tunes. PAUL: I want to ask about a couple of my favorites, of your tunes. My second one, but the song is not really about any woman in particular.

That was a fun track. I had the great Anson Funderburgh on guitar, and then I had Wes Starr, a great, great shuffle blues drummer from Texas. I had a lot of great players on that cut. It was cheaper for us to use the drum machine. I kind of like it though. I still like it. I listened to it in the car coming up here.

We were getting ready to go to Australia. It was the whole Buffett band and a lot of our buddies and stuff. They paint a picture. He wrote simple, brilliant lines that painted pictures of places people wanted to go. He built a fantasy place. But before all of that, he was a student in the late s at the University of Southern Mississippi, on his way to earning a degree in history.

He would entertain students on the steps of The Hub, the on-campus student center. They immediately bonded musically. They began touring together, just the two of them. On Saturday at 10 a. Neither musician will be able to attend. Taylor will be represented by his second cousin, Harrison Cunningham. We would record some stuff in the morning, and then Fingers would come in later that day and add his part. He always nailed his part the first take. When Jimmy got ready to record his next album, he told Don he wanted to use his own band.

So Jimmy called me. First time I heard them, they sounded like the Rolling Stones.