'I lived through the hard times folks read about now': the gospel of Brother Theotis Taylor
Struck by the melody of Brother Theotis Taylor’s given name, I’d consulted dictionaries. When I repeat the meaning to him – a gift from God – a wide smile eclipses his face. “I’m the only one in my family called Theotis,” he says.
The definition is apt for the Georgia spiritual singer and pianist, who has spent much of his 92 years playing music and preaching in churches, and whose astounding songs feel like they’ve been handed down from above. He was called to perform on bills with Sam Cooke when Cooke and the Soul Stirrers toured the region; he has sung at hallowed US venues such as Carnegie Hall and Harlem’s Apollo Theater. His shimmering, soaring voice elicits comparisons to Cooke, and to the Reverend Al Green, but apart from a handful of self-released singles and the 2018 collection Something Within Me, his recordings have not been widely available. A new collection finally arrives this month on Mississippi Records.
Hale and trim, dressed in a patterned polo shirt, he could pass for years younger. “I eat light,” Taylor says. “I don’t do no drinking or smoking.” He still preaches on occasion. A day earlier, he had mown five acres of grass. “Nothing like the smell of fresh-cut grass,” he says. “It’s a good feeling to look over the land and see what you did.” FaceTiming from his eldest son Hubert’s living room, his laughter is sustained and frequent. At one point, out of nowhere, he breaks into song. “I’m so happy,” he sings a cappella, in a divine and buoyant falsetto.
We are speaking on the afternoon of the funeral of George Floyd, three months into the pandemic, and the acknowledment of such unrestrained joy feels like it belongs to another time. But this is the effect of listening to Brother Theotis Taylor, the new selftitled collection of traditional songs and original spirituals, first recorded in the 1970s – the surprise of grace.
A song by Brother Taylor might express itself as pure praise (Thank You for the Sunshine), or elevate a familiar hymn (the transformative Burden Away puts me in mind of Allen Toussaint). The mournful and redemptive Somebody’s Gone, which Taylor began playing in the 60s, feels resurrected especially for our times. Though his music acknowledges sadness and hardship, its best gift is transcendence.
Taylor grew up in south Georgia in the town of Fitzgerald, where, apart from two stints in Florida, he has lived most of his adult life in the house he built for $150 in 1950, where he raised a family of eight. A church he built decades ago stands nearby. At three or four years old he survived malaria; his first memory is of being anointed and prayed over, a spoon placed in his mouth so he wouldn’t bite his tongue. This was in the Jim Crow era, but Taylor doesn’t use that terminology. “I lived through all those hard times folks read about now,” he says.
Taylor and Hubert take me on a FaceTime drive through Fitzgerald’s red-brick downtown. Founded in 1895 as a community for veterans of both sides of the civil war, the town was starkly divided. Through his face mask, Hubert describes the design of the town flag: “What you have here is one white brother holding the American flag that represents the union, and the other white brother is holding the rebel flag that represents the Confederates, and what it says on top of that is Fitzgerald.”
Today its population is majority African American. Growing up in the 1930s, Taylor walked five miles to school and back while white students rode past him in a school bus. We drive past the main streets where black people were forbidden to walk in the 30s and 40s, and down the alleyways, where Taylor remembers being allowed to enter stores only through back entrances. Even Coca-Cola, which was invented in nearby Atlanta, was off limits back then. “White man wouldn’t sell it to you,” Taylor says. “And you’d better not get caught with one,” adds Hubert, also a musician, “or you’d get beat within an inch of your life.”
Taylor’s method of coping with the senselessness was simply to try to survive it. “When you done been persecuted, you learn how to deal with a lot of things in life that you know ain’t right,” he says. “And you try to make your life as sweet as you can.”
Music was a natural sweetener, passed down through the family. At seven, Taylor began playing guitar, which he was forced to give up later in life (he has a tremble in his left hand from a severe lawn-mowing accident and from years of hard physical work). His grandfather taught him piano, and Taylor soon found his own expressive way of playing. “You can walk all over the place on a piano,” Taylor says. In his hands the piano is both lyrical and percussive.
Taylor’s finest instrument, however, is his rich, radiant voice. Young Theotis delivered convincing, pitch-perfect imitations of the roosters and chickens that roamed the woods; by five he was singing in the church choir. Eventually he joined a group, the Gospel Harmoniers, graduated to singing solo and performed for black and white audiences alike, usually no farther than 50 miles from home. His fellow musicians were farmers, too. “Got to catch that mule in the morning,” Taylor says.
Like his father, Taylor worked by day as a turpentine farmer, where he was known for his extraordinary productivity. Wielding a heavy blade he could scrape resin from 2,000 trees in a day and load 450lb barrels of collected turpentine on to trucks. Zora Neale Hurston, who interviewed turpentine woodsmen, wrote in her 1935 folklore collection: “They are most reluctant at times to reveal that which the soul lives by.”
“That which the soul lives by” is what comes to mind when Taylor describes his songwriting process as he worked: “They just come in as a thought, and that carries you all through the day.”
“I’d hear Daddy out there singing to himself in the woods,” says Hubert, who also worked for a time as a turpentine farmer. “He’d work so hard and so fast, other people would be annoyed with him but then he’d come back and help them.” Later at home Brother Taylor recorded his compositions on a Silvertone reel-to-reel machine. “The music would just come down all around and through you,” Taylor recalls of these home studio sessions. Between Taylor’s floating voice, the flourish of the piano, and the subtle wisp of tape hiss that occasionally enters, it is possible to imagine what that room must have felt like, holy in its mingling of sorrow and hope. “It’s spiritual music,” Hubert says, “but some of it’s got a little touch of blues in it.”
Early among the losses Taylor weathered in the civil rights movementwas his friend Sam Cooke, shot and killed in a Los Angeles motel in December 1964, 10 days before the release of his song A Change Is Gonna Come. The last time he’d asked Cooke when he’d be back to tour Georgia, Cooke said he didn’t know. “It hurt me to my heart to hear that he got killed,” Taylor says. “Oh yeah, I sure miss Sam. Everything he sang was special.”
Taylor shares his own strategy for survival: “One thing I learned in life is that if you stay in your place you ain’t gonna have no problem with nobody.” Later he amends this. “Though a lot of times you don’t let anybody know what you’re doing! A lot of things you got do in secret.”
When Martin Luther King spoke in towns in Georgia and Alabama, Taylor was among the caravans travelling hundreds of miles to hear him.A particular concern of Brother Taylor’s was voting rights. The Taylors owned their land but he knew plenty black sharecropping families, friends and neighbours intimidated by their bosses into voting for the boss’s preferred candidate, if they got to vote at all. “Now me, I may tell you one thing, but when I get up there in the voting booth I might do another!”
Taylor served as treasurer of the local NAACP chapter at a time when