James Taylor’s Tanglewood show on July 4

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July 8, 2024 –

Over the course of his long career, James Taylor has shared from the stage intimate biographical details, which he presents in more comprehensive fashion in an audiobook titled Break Shot. He is frank about the trauma of being uprooted as a young boy from the warmth of an old New England family into the furnace of the Jim Crow south, for his father’s medical career.

He acknowledges how he was launched into his own career by a chance encounter with a talent scout for Apple records. And, Taylor is as open about drug addiction and recovery as is anybody else in the entertainment business, and always presents an attitude of gratefulness for his career in that business.

We were in the vast audience at Tanglewood July 2, 2012 when JT shared his audience with Taylor Swift, who has since eclipsed in popularity not only James, but Jesus and the Beatles, too. Taylor Swith is no more musically gifted than James, Jesus, or the Beatles, but she has business sense to beat the band!

Although he has brought them onstage since they were little boys, now James seems eager to hand the keys to the family business over to son Henry, who seems glad to accept them. Whether young Henry’s paternal booster shot propels him to the same heights his father attained nobody knows. We can be certain, however, that his father has told him, and likely more than once, that it takes a hell of lot more than luck for any career to last fifty years, much less one that includes world class venues such as Tanglewood.