Artists:James Michael Taylor

James Michael Taylor

His daughter suggested that James Michael Taylor do a CD filled with name songs, so he did. Released the CD, 'NameDropper' with homemade liner notes. Put his picture, taken in 1975, on the front.

Taylor has been around the Fort Worth club scene and regional festivals since the 70s as a solo act or playing with TXH2O ( a trio with his wife and, yes, his e-wife). He's a poet, sculptor, juggler, stage hand, and backhoe operator.

Not long ago Taylor gave me a copy. A couple of days later, a guitar teacher in East Texas gave me a copy and told me Taylor is a genius. A couple of weeks later, a music fan gave me a copy and said I might like one or two of the songs. So, it must be time to review it.

The songs are acoustic and personal all but one based on the lives of people he knew or knows by name; one, "Jonah," is about a homeless man whose name he doesn't know. Taylor's voice is haunted by something, perhaps reality and experience as he sings about what often goes unspoken, about futile lives, about a woman who's hardly gone when she leaves, about the realization that "Hello" lasts forever while "good-bye" is a passing thing, etc.

It's a pretty good serious listen in the American folk tradition. Like most CDs it's never going to top anybody's chart or sell a million copies. And, as someone once said, so it goes.

-Tom Geddie - Buddie Magazine - March 2007

SLAUGHTER MOUNTAIN is not a name on a sign at the edge of any town or at the base of any mountain that I can show you on a map. But I can show you the creek into which my mother said she emptied her tubercular mother's spit bucket and I can show you the sealed entrance to the mine where my grandfather, Fred Teeters, breathed the dust that destroyed his lungs. I can show you the mislabeled grave stones that mark their resting place. I can show you the cave my mother played in with her friends. The cave is now a national monument. I can show you the factory that makes the hickory handles. I can show you the river where someone's little brother was swept away that day and I can show you a picture in a yearbook of a girl named Marie Angel. I can show you sunlight on spider webs and I can show you a bale of cotton. The same five hundred pound bale of cotton that scabbed human hands picked for three dollars. I can show you the grave of those who demanded one dollar for each hundred pounds. I can show you the berries on the fence at the end of the trail and I can show you the same sun that sat on that mountain. - James Michael Taylor