Dennis W. Taylor

Dennis W. Taylor (* before 1925, † after 1925) was an American talent scout from Kentucky . Taylor worked for Gennett Records in the 1920s and brought many old-time musicians such as Fiddlin 'Doc Roberts to the label.

Life

Dennis W. Taylor, whose exact life is unknown, was a wealthy farmer who lived on Fork Creek near Richmond , Kentucky. Although Taylor was not a talented musician - contemporaries later recalled that he "couldn't even whistle properly" - he liked old-time music and began managing a local string band he called Taylor's Kentucky Boys and organizing performances on Barn Dances and in schools.

Around 1925 Taylor came into contact with Lee Butt, then head of Starr-Gennett Studios in Richmond , Indiana , and who offered him to employ him as an independent talent scout. Unlike the other big record labels, Gennett couldn't raise the financial means to send permanent engineers and A&R managers to the southern states to track down and record the rural musicians, so they left this work to people like Taylor, who were already there and the groups and musicians referred to Gennett. Over the next six years, Taylor brought numerous old-time musicians from Kentucky to the label. He often drove into the country to look for suitable artists, took them under "management contracts" (as Taylor called it) and took them to his farm in Richmond, where he and his wife - who knew far more about music than Taylor himself - the musicians prepared for the studio sessions. Since the rural musicians often played more than twenty minutes on the usual Barn Dances pieces, it was not always an easy task to reduce the old pieces to three minutes. When the groups were musically ready, Taylor drove his clients to the Indiana studio.

Taylor paid for all the travel expenses and paid the musicians a certain amount of money for each recorded song, but in return received the Gennett musicians' fees (at times $ 800 to $ 900 per month). This sometimes led to disputes with the musicians who, in retrospect, felt cheated.

Among the over a hundred artists Taylor signed for Gennett include names like Fiddlin 'Doc Roberts and Asa Martin (Gennett's most successful old-time musicians), Marion Underwood , Byrd Moore , Charlie Taylor , Edgar Boaz , John Foster and others also some African American musicians like the fiddler Joe Nelson . One of Taylor's latest discoveries was the young Red Foley , whose voice Taylor didn't like and therefore he didn't bring Foley into the studio.

Little is known about Taylor's later life.

Services

With over a hundred musicians recorded, Dennis Taylor is considered Kentucky's first (and possibly one of the earliest country ) managers and agents. Through him, artists like Doc Roberts and Byrd Moore came into the studio and immortalized their music on record, whereby the early musical traditions, especially with regard to southern folk and old-time music, were saved and collected for future generations. Even if Taylor never understood himself like that, he can be described as an early folklorist like Alan and John Lomax later.

Taylor was also responsible for the first session of rural musicians from Kentucky, which took place in September 1925 for Gennett. Welby Toomey , arguably one of Taylor's earliest discoveries, had known Taylor since childhood and when Taylor roamed the region he ultimately came back to Toomey and won him over to a recording session. He put the fiddler Doc Roberts, whose farm bordered on Taylors, at Toomey's side and at the end of the month the first tracks by rural musicians from Kentucky were written at Starr-Gennett Studio in Richmond, Indiana.

literature

• Charles K. Wolfe: Kentucky Country: Folk and Country Music of Kentucky. University of Kentucky Press, 1996, ISBN 0813108799 , pp. 27-29

Individual evidence

1. ^ Wolfe: Kentucky Country , p. 27