On Chicago’s West Side, where the blues once seeped through floorboards and screen doors like a living thing, and your mother, father and nearly all your siblings are blues musicians, it’s no wonder drummer Timothy “Badboy” Taylor is also part of the genre.
“It was nice growing up in a blues house because all the musicians used to be there with my father,” says Taylor, now 61, remembering his late parents, master guitarist and VeeJay recording artist Eddie Taylor Sr. and his mother, blues singer Vera Taylor. “Most of the musicians like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf (Chester Burnett), Jimmy Reed who would come to our house have passed on now.”
Pretty much all of the blues giants rehearsed in the Taylor home while trading jokes, over Vera’s homecooked meals and arguing goodnaturedly about who could “cross the harp” (play harmonica) the best.
“Little Walter [Marion Walter Jacobs, blues singer, songwriter, and one of the most influential blues harp players in history] and Carey Bell [a Chicago blues harmonica master] were the best,” Tim says of the names that once sat at the Taylor dining table, passing cornbread and telling stories that are now part of history.
For Tim and his siblings, (four girls and four boys) those legendary gatherings came with rules.
“We couldn’t be around when they came over,” he says. “We had to go to our room. It was disrespectful to be looking in grown folks’ mouths. Plus, they’d be cussing and stuff. My parents were from Mississippi. We were raised the Mississippi way.”
His parents were part of the wave of Black Southerners who left Mississippi for Chicago during the Great Migration, the decadeslong exodus stretching from the 1910s into the 1970s, carrying with them their music, their faith and their values in search of a better life.
Mississippi had one of the highest lynching rates in the country, with more than 650 documented cases between the 1880s and 1960s. Violence was commonly used against African Americans as a way to enforce racial control and punish any perceived challenge to white supremacy.
Most Black families were trapped in sharecropping, a system designed to keep them in debt to white landowners. Wages were low, credit was controlled by white merchants, and leaving a plantation was dangerous.
Most Black women in Mississippi worked as maids, cooks, laundresses and nannies in white households.
Mississippi enforced some of the strictest Jim Crow laws (roughly from the late 1870s through the mid1960s) in the South. Black people were barred from voting, serving on juries, attending white schools and using white facilities. Migrating was a matter of survival.
Following the example of his older brother, blues artist Larry “Bluesman” Taylor, Tim picked up the drums at age 13 but developed a different drumming style.
“My brother and I play two different styles,” Tim says. “I play the shuffle and Larry plays the straight beat.”
Instead of straight eighth notes, the shuffle style is described as a longshort, longshort swing, creating a rolling, loping groove at the heart of classic Chicago blues.
“Most blues drummers in Chicago don’t play shuffles anymore,” Tim explains. “I learned from the older guys like Freddie Below.”
Below, the legendary drummer who backed Little Walter, Muddy Waters, Wolf, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Junior Wells, and Elmore James, helped define the Chicago blues backbeat, the rhythmic foundation of early rock ’n’ roll.
Tim saw most of those artists firsthand.
“I used to sit back and watch them play,” he says. “At one point we lived on Madison (Street) and California (Avenue), and Wolf and all the others would be playing downstairs. My dad played with Wolf too. I used to sneak down the back stairs to watch. I’d run back up when I heard them coming so I wouldn’t get in trouble.”
Over the decades, Tim has played on so many recordings he’s lost count.
“I’ve recorded with everybody like Johnnie Littlejohn, Tail Dragger (James Yancey Jones), A.C. Reed, my brother Larry, my brother Eddie Taylor Jr., my sisters Demetria, Edna, Brenda, Lurrie Bell… it’s so many people I can’t even think of them all.”
Larry Taylor acknowledges his brother as one of the best drummers in the blues genre. Tim accepts the praise, saying the music has changed and that his brother is just about the only one trying to keep traditional blues alive.
“Back in the day, musicians played straight blues,” Tim says. “Today they’re playing bluesrockdisco. They’re not playing straight blues. Don’t nobody play straight shuffles anymore.”
With talent running through his veins, Tim built his own sound by blending what he learned from the oldtimers with his own instincts.
“I play a little bit like all the legends,” he says.
What troubles him most isn’t just the stylistic shifts but also shrinking spaces for the blues genre itself.
“The [traditional] blues doesn’t get the credit it used to,” he says. “They’ll hire a disco band before they hire a blues or jazz or R&B band. The blues is dying. All the good blues clubs are gone.”
All of Tim’s siblings were blues musicians except one. “My baby brother Milton Taylor, we were teaching him bass, but he didn’t want to do it,” Tim says.
Tim talks about retirement sometimes, but says he is not likely to. One reason is that Larry talks him out if and the other is because the music is too deeply rooted in him.
“It’s in my blood,” he says. “I was born with the blues in me. I’m not going to retire. I’m just going to keep on playing.”
He pauses, acknowledging the serious health issues he’s battling.
“I’m very spiritual,” he says. “I was raised in church. My parents always taught us that if someone threw stones at us, not to throw stones back.”
The blues helped shape his life and remains part of his everyday rhythm. And as long as Timothy “Badboy” Taylor can play, the Chicago shuffle will carry on.