Taj Mahal

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Taj Mahal

Singer, Songwriter, Composer

Overflowed With Personality and Authenticity

Singer andFsongwriter Taj Mahal is a musician for whom origins are everything. An avid musicologist, particularly of traditional “country” blues, Mahal combines an extensive knowledge of black folk music with his own distinct musical interpretations. Mahal rose to prominence in the late 1960s and 1970s as a performer and recording artist of both traditional blues standards and his own authentic-sounding blues compositions. During that time, he became well-known for his trademark buoyant and energetic stage performances, and for a string of albums which, as a Village Voice reviewer once wrote, “always exhibited a roving intelligence and refreshing humor.” Throughout his career, Mahal has been acclaimed as a leading modern purveyor of traditional blues and, despite the trends of popular music, has continually adhered to his own distinct style—one steeped in, and respectful of, black folk tradition. “Raw, bone-deep funk and sweetness flow naturally from Mahal’s fingers and mouth or lathers on teasing licks that have nothing to do with virtuosity and everything to do with taste,” wrote Josef Woodard in a 1991 Down Beat profile. “Mahal is unmistakable, a musician without precedent or peers.”

Mahal was born Henry Saint Clair Fredericks in New York City—the name Taj Mahal came to him in a dream; he chose it because of its sound. Early musical influences included his father, who was a West Indian jazz pianist and arranger, and his mother, a schoolteacher and gospel singer from South Carolina. Mahal’s involvement with the blues, however, was inspired from within. While working towards an agricultural degree at the University of Massachusetts during the early 1960s, he discovered traditional blues—such as that performed by legendary artists Lightnin’ Hopkins and Leadbelly—and absorbed himself in researching the roots of black folk music. It was a direction that went against the grain of much black music, which at the time was more intent on breaking with the past. “That was a choice on my part,” he recalled to Dimitri Ehrlich in a 1991 Pulse! interview. “There was something about the blues that just full and wholly knocked me out…. Instead of popular music creating me, I programmed myself for what I’m interested in.” What particularly attracted him to the blues, as he explained to Ehrlich, was how—as in African musical tradition—music functioned as “part of the whole of life.”

Explored Black Folk Music

Originally a bass player, Mahal became familiar with the acoustic guitar, piano, harp, banjo, mandolin, harmonica, dulcimer, and a variety of fifes and whistles. In addition to the blues, he delved into other black folk music, including that of Africa and reggae. Disenchanted

For the Record…

Born Henry Saint Clair Fredericks, May 17, 1942, in New York, NY; son of Henry Saint Clair (a jazz musician) and Mildred (a schoolteacher; maiden name, Shields) Fredericks; married Inshirah Geter, January 23, 1976; children: Aya, Taj, Gahmelah, Ahmen, Deva, Nani. Education: University of Massachusetts, B.A., 1964.

Performing artist, 1964—; played with group Rising Sons, late 1960s; recording artist, 1967—. Composer of scores for films Sounder, Sounder II, and Brothers; television programs Ewoks, The Man Who Broke a Thousand Chains, and Brer Rabbit; and the play, Mule Bone, produced on Broadway, 1991. Actor in films King of Ragtime, Sounder, and Sounder II.

Awards: Best Ethnic Music Award, Bay Area Music Awards, 1979, for Brothers soundtrack.

Addresses: Office —c/o Folklore Productions, 1671 Appian Way, Santa Monica, CA 90401.

with what he felt was too constricted a folk scene on the East Coast, Mahal moved to California in 1965. He joined guitarist Ry Cooder to form a band called Rising Sons, which, despite showing great promise, broke up after a record deal folded. “Ry was one person I connected big-time with because he always heard the music,” Mahal explained to Woodard. “It wasn’t the swagger or the stagger or the dark glasses or the pork pie hat or the look or the way you held your saxophone.” Mahal then set out on a solo career, and in 1967 released the first of what would be several successful albums for Columbia Records. Throughout the rest of the 1960s and 1970s Mahal was a leading performer of blues and other black folk music at concerts and music festivals across the country. A reviewer for the Village Voice wrote in 1974 that “Taj Mahal has pursued black traditional music, particularly blues, with single-mindedness, probity, and originality.… He has become our preeminent modern traditionalist.”

Overflowed With Personality and Authenticity

Mahal has been acclaimed throughout his career for his dynamic stage performances. A contributor to Newsweek wrote in 1972: “[Mahal’s] on a journey into the heart of black music from the moment he appears on stage in jeans and a colorful dashiki, 6 feet 4 inches, smiling through his bearded face, and says, ‘We’re gonna start out real smooth and take it to where we can’t hardly stand it.’” Often holding his steel guitar or banjo while seated on a straight-backed chair, or engaging his audience in foot-stomping and hand-clapping, Mahal infuses old blues standards, as Newsweek noted, “with a burlesque style that caricatures the grin-and-bear-it blues tradition, or with a vocal inflection that’s West Indian.” John Rockwell in the New York Times described Mahal on stage as “an outwardly laconic blues singer and scholar who makes simply wonderful music…. Many blues specialists, black or white, either sound studiously antiquarian or distort the purity of the music in a search for personality. Taj Mahal overflows with personality, … yet the end effect remains one of authenticity.”

Composed Sounder Soundtrack

Mahal’s albums reflect his predominant pursuit of old-style country blues, yet they also display a wide-ranging interest in preserving black music of all origins, including reggae, gospel, and the folk music of Western Africa. “To me the music is sacred,” he told Ehrlich. “Blues, gospel, jazz, Latin music, whatever the style, this stuff should flourish from generation to generation.” Woodard suggested that Mahal’s 1969 album, Giant Step/Ole Folks at Home, is one of his most important, consisting of “stark, lustrous renditions of traditional songs on guitar, banjo, and voice.” Mahal commented to Woodard that “some of the roots of [Ole Folks] went back in a lot of different directions.” Of the numerous albums Mahal released in the late 1960s and 1970s, particularly notable is the soundtrack he composed for the 1972 movie Sounder, in which he also played the role of Ike. After a relatively dry recording spell during the 1980s, Mahal returned in 1991 with Like Never Before, a collection that displays him singing a variety of music, including blues, reggae, and scat, on such playful tunes as “Squat That Rabbit,” “Cakewalk Into Town,” and “Big Legged Mommas Are Back in Style.” Like Never Before features both simple arrangements of typical Mahal material, in addition to cuts employing large instrument and vocal ensembles; contributing artists include Hall & Oates, the Pointer Sisters, Dr. John, and Eric Clapton. According to Ehrlich, “Mahal’s voice sounds better than ever for all his experience, burnished and aglow,” and the album is “one of his finest efforts in years.”

Also in 1991, Mahal composed the musical score for the Broadway production of Mule Bone, a stage play originally written during the 1920s Harlem Renaissance by poet Langston Hughes and novelist Zora Neale Hurston, but never produced because of a dispute between the authors. Set in a small black Florida town in the early part of the 1900s, the play depicts a conflict between two men in the community and gives insight into the society of southern black rural life at the turn of the century. Mahal was chosen by the play’s producers to compose the musical score—which included setting Hughes’s poems to music—because of his stature as a black musicologist and, as Mule Bone’s dramaturge Anne Cattaneo told Ehrlich, he “was the best person who could understand and reclaim this musical tradition.” Mahal commented to Ehrlich on capturing the essence of Hughes’s and Hurston’s love of black heritage: “I wanted to pay homage to both of these wonderful people by representing them a generation and a half later—and at the same time have it loose enough to still be me. The music had to be in touch with the old timers, and the new timers as well.”