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Johnnie Harrison Taylor (born May 5, 1937, Crawfordsville, Arkansas; died May 31, 2000, Dallas, Texas) was an American vocalist in a wide variety of genres, from gospel, blues and soul to pop, doo-wop and disco.
Taylor had one release, "Somewhere to Lay My Head", on Chicago's Chance Records in the 1950s, as part of the doo-wop group Five Echoes. His singing was strikingly close to that of Sam Cooke, and he was hired to take Cooke's place in Cooke's gospel group, the Soul Stirrers, in 1957.
A few years later, after Cooke had established his independent SAR Records, Taylor signed on and recorded "Rome Wasn't Built In A Day" in 1962. However, SAR Records quickly became defunct after Cooke's death in 1964.
In 1966, Taylor moved to Stax Records in Memphis, where he was dubbed "The Philosopher of Soul". While there he recorded with the label's house band, Booker T. & the MGs. His hits included "I Had a Dream", "I've Got to Love Somebody's Baby" (both written by the team of Isaac Hayes and David Porter) and most notably "Who's Making Love?", which reached No. 5 on the Billboard Top 40 and No. 1 on the R&B charts in 1968.
During his tenure at Stax, he became an R&B star, with over a dozen chart successes, such as "Jody's Got Your Girl and Gone", "Cheaper to Keep Her" (Mack Rice) and producer Don Davis's "I Believe in You (You Believe in Me)". Taylor, along with Isaac Hayes and The Staple Singers was one of the label's flagship artists.
After Stax folded in the mid 1970s, Taylor switched to Columbia Records, where he made his best-known hit, "Disco Lady", in 1976. "Disco Lady" was the first certified platinum single (2 million copies sold) by the RIAA.
Columbia pigeonholed Taylor as a disco artist, however, and neglected his wide-ranging talent. After a brief stint at Beverly Glen Records, Taylor signed with Malaco Records after the label's founder Tommy Couch and producing partner Wolf Stephenson heard him sing at blues singer Z.Z. Hill's funeral in the spring of 1984. Hill, like Taylor, had suffered from overly slick production and lack of artistic control on Columbia before abandoning attempts at mainstream popularity, in favor of attaining critical acclaim and regional fame in the South.
Backed by members of The Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section as well as in-house veterans like former Stax keyboardist Carson Whitsett, Malaco gave Taylor the type of recording freedom that Stax had given him in the late 1960s and early 1970s, enabling him to record ten albums for the Malaco label in his sixteen year stint. Taylor's record sales were good but not enough for the singer to receive the measure of stardom he once had.
In 1996, Taylor's eighth album for Malaco, Good Love!, made it to Number One on Billboard's Blues chart (#15 R&B), as was the biggest record in Malaco's history. With this success, Malaco recorded a live video of Taylor at the Longhorn Ballroom in Dallas, Texas in the summer of 1997.
Taylor was given a Pioneer Award by the Rhythm and Blues Foundation in 1999. He died of a massive heart attack at Charleton Methodist Hospital in Dallas in 2000.
Taylor's final song was "Soul Heaven", in which he dreamed of being at a concert featuring deceased Soul music icons Otis Redding, Jackie Wilson, Marvin Gaye, Sam Cooke, and MGs drummer Al Jackson, among others. In one verse, Taylor sang, "I didn't want to wake up/I was havin' such a good time".
In 2004, The UK's Shapeshifters sampled Taylor's 1982 release "What About My Love?" for their single "Lola's Theme".
Taylor has three children that have been recording artists, the best known of which is Floyd Taylor, a Malaco signee whose first CD was titled Legacy.
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