Taj Mahal
The Real Thing
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Taj Mahal is one of those happy contradictions of popular music. Originally a blues musician, and still essentially one, he is nevertheless only 28 years old and a university graduate. Though Taj is black, his initiation into the world of blues was more through scratchy recordings than the songs relatives and neighbors sang. The younger generation of black blues musicians, like Junior Wells, Buddy Guy, Otis Rush and the late Magic Sam, with whom he might off-handedly be compared, are older than he is and the products of an indigenous local scene (Chicago). Taj is Harlem-raised and a recent citizen of Los Angeles. Naturally, the differences in age, background, education and geography
Read More manifest themselves in the music. While Junior, Buddy, etc., play city blues, Taj plays the country blues electrified. That is, his band does. Taj himself plays a National steel-bodied guitar, occasionally amplified, mouth harp, banjo and fife. Junior Wells, of course, plays harp, but harp is also frowned upon in certain young Chicago blues circles for being too down home. And none of the young Chicago guitarists would ever play a National. Yet it would be equally wrong to lump Taj with figures of the white blues revival like Bloom-field, Butterfield and Clapton. Among these and other white musicians, an inordinate emphasis was placed on instrumental virtuosity; Taj is a jack of many instruments and a master of none. And though Taj's kind of music is more often played by white musicians than black ones today, one can hardly call Taj's blackness incidental. Both his and the young white musicians' music depend on a studied re-creation of defunct and dying forms, yet Taj's vocal timbre, diction and inflection lend his performances an authenticity and authority which many white musicians lack. It is Taj's combination of earthiness and musical breadth and sophistication which enables him to do some of his most challenging material. Not a folk artist in the literal sense, he effectively resurrects and updates older material. His first album, Taj Mahal, was the cornerstone of his style: country blues of Sleepy John Estes, Sonny Boy Williamson and Robert Johnson electrified, in both senses, by one of the most exciting bands of the Sixties–including Jesse Edwin Davis on lead guitar and Ry Cooder on rhythm. Its one flaw was that of a novice: in the manner of Bob Dylan's first album, the singing was overly exuberant and unsubtle. Natch'l Blues was smoother hewn, if no less compelling, and was more of a planned, coherent album. Here, he was rewriting traditional material for his own purposes. Out of "Corinna," performed at various times by Joe Turner, Roy Peterson and Bob Dylan, Taj created something entirely his own, just as he juggled verses and generally calmed down "Rollin' and Tumblin'" to make "Done Changed My Way of Living." The album was also notable for his taking entirely non-blues songs, like the traditional "The
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