James Taylor 詹姆斯·泰勒

詹姆斯·泰勒（James Taylor），1948年生于波士顿，美国民谣唱将，是二十世纪七十年代Singer-songwriter Movement的领军人物，以内敛、忧郁的演唱风格而著称，1970年的专辑《Sweet Baby James》是民谣摇滚中的经典之作，1976年的精选集《Greatest Hits》获钻石唱片认证。共发行16张录音室专辑、4张精选集、4张现场专辑，仅在美国唱片销量就达3300万张（RIAA），共获得5座格莱美奖，2000年入驻Rock and Roll Hall of Fame（摇滚名人堂）和Songwriters Hall of Fame（创作人名人堂）

James Vernon Taylor (born March 12, 1948) is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist. A five-time Grammy Award winner, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000.He is one of the best-selling music artists of all time, having sold more than 100 million records worldwide.

Taylor achieved his breakthrough in 1970 with the No. 3 single "Fire and Rain" and had his first No. 1 hit the following year with "You've Got a Friend", a recording of Carole King's classic song. His 1976 Greatest Hits album was certified Diamond and has sold 12 million US copies. Following his 1977 album, JT, he has retained a large audience over the decades. Every album that he released from 1977 to 2007 sold over 1 million copies. He enjoyed a resurgence in chart performance during the late 1990s and 2000s, when he recorded some of his most-awarded work (including Hourglass, October Road, and Covers). He achieved his first number-one album in the US in 2015 with his recording Before This World.

He is known for his popular covers of other people's songs, such as "How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You)" and the aforementioned "You've Got A Friend", as well as originals such as "Fire and Rain".

James Vernon Taylor was born at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston on March 12, 1948, where his father, Isaac M. Taylor, worked as a resident physician. His father came from a wealthy Scottish family from the South. His mother, the former Gertrude Woodard (1921–2015), studied singing with Marie Sundelius at the New England Conservatory of Music and was an aspiring opera singer before the couple's marriage in 1946. James was the second of five children, the others being Alex (1947–1993), Kate (born 1949), Livingston (born 1950), and Hugh (born 1952).

In 1951, his family moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, when Isaac took a job as an assistant professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. They built a house in the Morgan Creek area off the present Morgan Creek Road, which was sparsely populated. James would later say, "Chapel Hill, the Piedmont, the outlying hills, were tranquil, rural, beautiful, but quiet. Thinking of the red soil, the seasons, the way things smelled down there, I feel as though my experience of coming of age there was more a matter of landscape and climate than people." James attended public primary school in Chapel Hill. Isaac's career prospered, but he was frequently away from home, on military service at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland, or as part of Operation Deep Freeze in Antarctica in 1955 and 1956. Isaac Taylor later rose to become dean of the UNC School of Medicine from 1964 to 1971.Beginning in 1953, the Taylors spent summers on Martha's Vineyard.

James first learned to play the cello as a child in North Carolina and switched to the guitar in 1960. His guitar style evolved, influenced by hymns, carols, and the music of Woody Guthrie, and his technique derived from his bass clef-oriented cello training and from experimenting on his sister Kate's keyboards: "My style was a finger-picking style that was meant to be like a piano, as if my thumb were my left hand, and my first, second, and third fingers were my right hand." He began attending Milton Academy, a preparatory boarding school in Massachusetts in fall 1961. Summering before then with his family on Martha's Vineyard, he met Danny Kortchmar, an aspiring teenage guitarist from Larchmont, New York. The two began listening to and playing blues and folk music together, and Kortchmar quickly realized that Taylor's singing had a "natural sense of phrasing, every syllable beautifully in time. I knew James had that thing." Taylor wrote his first song on guitar at 14, and he continued to learn the instrument effortlessly. By the summer of 1963, he and Kortchmar were playing coffeehouses around the Vineyard, billed as "Jamie & Kootch".

Taylor faltered during his junior year at Milton, feeling uneasy in the high-pressure college prep environment despite good scholastic performance. The Milton headmaster would later say, "James was more sensitive and less goal-oriented than most students of his day." He returned home to North Carolina to finish out the semester at Chapel Hill High School. There, he joined a band formed by his brother Alex called The Corsayers (later The Fabulous Corsairs), playing electric guitar; in 1964, they cut a single in Raleigh that featured James's song "Cha Cha Blues" on the B-side. Having lost touch with his former school friends in North Carolina, Taylor returned to Milton for his senior year.

There, Taylor started applying to colleges but soon descended into depression; his grades collapsed, he slept 20 hours each day, and he felt part of a "life that [he was] unable to lead." In late 1965 he committed himself to the renowned McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts,[20] where he was treated with Thorazine and where the organized days began to give him a sense of time and structure. As the Vietnam War escalated, Taylor received a psychological rejection from Selective Service System when he appeared before them with two white-suited McLean assistants and was uncommunicative. Taylor earned a high school diploma in 1966 from the hospital's associated Arlington School. He would later view his nine-month stay at McLean as "a lifesaver... like a pardon or like a reprieve," and both his brother Livingston and sister Kate would later be patients and students there as well. As for his mental health struggles, Taylor would think of them as innate and say: "It's an inseparable part of my personality that I have these feelings."

Taylor's four siblings (Alex, Livingston, Hugh, and Kate) have also been musicians with recorded albums. Livingston is still an active musician; Kate was active in the 1970s but did not record another album until 2003; Hugh operates a bed-and-breakfast with his wife, The Outermost Inn in Aquinnah on Martha's Vineyard; and Alex died in 1993 on James's birthday.

After his divorce from Carly Simon in 1983, Taylor married actress Kathryn Walker on December 14, 1985 at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. She had helped him get off heroin, but the marriage ended in divorce in 1996.

On February 18, 2001, at the Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Boston, Taylor wed for the third time, marrying Caroline ("Kim") Smedvig, the director of public relations and marketing for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. They had begun dating in 1995, when they met as he appeared with John Williams and the Boston Pops Orchestra. Part of their relationship was worked into the album October Road, on the song "On the 4th of July". The couple reside in the town of Washington, Massachusetts, with their twin boys, Rufus and Henry, born in April 2001.

Sally and Ben, his children with Carly Simon, have also embarked on musical careers. Taylor's children with his current wife express little interest in music and after their birth, he moved to Lenox, Massachusetts after their birth.

From:<a href="<a href=" https:="" en.wikipedia.org="" wiki="" '="">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James Taylor