Joanne Shaw Taylor
She’s the teenage blues fan from Solihull who’s become the genre’s biggest British star.
She’s the teenage blues fan from Solihull who’s become the genre’s biggest British star.
If you cut Joanne Shaw Taylor, she’d bleed blues. You’d also find a lot of northern soul, Motown and classic rock guitar heroism, all of which streamlines into her slick, textured brand of contemporary blues rock. But it all began with the blues records in her dad’s collection. “He was a harmonica player, and so because of him I knew who Sonny Terry was, and Brownie McGee and Big Bill Broonzy, guys like that,” she says. “But it really took Stevie Ray Vaughan to open it up for me. I think, just being a young person, it was easier for me to get what he was about; the songs were quite catchy and poppy, so that’s what got me to go check out the older artists… It’s a big jump for a fourteen-year-old to get into Bukka White or Robert Johnson. Some of those recordings are a hundred years old. Start easy with the big electric guys.”
It’s because of this that the prospect of working with Jim Gaines excited her, more than it perhaps would your average teenage Brit. She first encountered the producer at the age of 16, shortly after she was signed by Eurythmics guitarist/songwriter Dave Stewart. “Dave was planning on doing an album for me,” she recalled. “He asked me who I wanted to work with. I said Jim Gaines. I’d only been playing a couple of years, and I was still all about Stevie Ray Vaughan, Albert Collins… and Luther Allison. I was a huge Luther Allison fan. Jim had worked with all of those artists, so it was an obvious choice.”
Her first albums were released via German blues label Ruf
Records. These days Taylor lives in Detroit, and made her majorlabel debut last year with the energised, soul-heavy album Reckless Heart (Sony). In many ways she’s moved on from the more singular blues focus of her roots, although her presence on ‘blues cruise’ line-ups in recent years suggests she’ll always have a foot in that world.
“Nothing like being locked on a boat with the blues to make you happy,” she says with a wry smile. “It is a weird thing, and they are so much fun. I mean, I’ve done the Joe [Bonamassa] cruises a couple of times, and artists get free drinks in the casino bar which is twenty-four/seven, so you do find yourself in the bar with Marcus King at like two in the morning… So that’s like your busman’s holiday!”
What do you look back on most fondly at this point in your career?
“All of it, really. It’s been brilliant. And I think a lot of it is that I’ve managed to do it for myself for the most part; touring America, I booked all that myself, I found the bands through friends and connections… Going back to just being a thirteen-year-old girl from Solihull who wanted to play blues guitar, it was a bit of a long shot anyway. But the fact that I managed to do it and move myself to America, which is kinda where I always wanted to live… That in itself is something I’m really pleased about. Whatever level I get to, I’ve managed to make a living out of it and have a happy life doing it.”
“I’d only been playing a couple of years, and I was still all about Stevie Ray Vaughan, Albert Collins and Luther Allison.”
They play rock’n’roll, but really we have the old blues guard to thank. As a youth, singer/guitarist Chris Vos heard Muddy Waters’s Hard Again and decided to try playing guitar on his lap. As adults, Vos and his bandmates Alex Stiff (bass) and Marc Cazorla (drums) met in LA and bonded over John Lee Hooker and Canned Heat’s album Hooker ‘N Heat. All of which pours into their deliciously feral but hip-shaking brand of rhythm & blues.