by Arthur "Dan" Gifford

It's impossible for me to think of Alex Taylor without also thinking that there but for the grace of God go I.

In a 1950s Chapel Hill full of frat boys and others offering beer to kids, Alex Taylor and I started drinking before our teen years. He became an alcoholic, I did not. Just before Chapel Hill was hit with a 60s plague of street drugs that would kill the bodies and damage the minds of a number of friends, I went to Virginia Episcopal School and only heard the horror stories when I'd return to town during vacation breaks.  Against all that, it has often crossed my mind that had I stayed, "it coulda been me," as David Bowie said.

Alex Taylor who was a great singer, but never mastered an instrument, at his home at 618 Morgan Creek Road Chapel Hill

Maybe my escape from Alex' fate was providence. Maybe it was dumb luck, but whatever it was, I took a big hit in the gut on reading about his death at age 47 -- largely attributed to the effects of alcoholism, the stories said -- because some of my earliest happy childhood memories involved Alex.

We were born about two months apart and I first recall meeting him in kindergarten at The Little Red School House though my parents said we had played together earlier.

Alex' father and my mother were both UNC professors who practically worked in the same building in allied fields. My mother was Alice Gifford, the first professor brought on board the new UNC School of Nursing in 1950 and the person charged with obtaining its accreditation. Dr. Isaac "Ike" Taylor was a newly arrived professor of medicine at UNC who would later become the Dean of the Medical School. That connection aside, there were other social binders in play. Both my mother and Alex's father had strong Scottish ancestral links and Boston connections. My mother had grown up in Boston and was in the first Yale class that accepted women. That was a very big deal to both Alex's New England raised mother Trudy -- an early champion of women's equality -- and father, a Harvard Medical School graduate.

James Taylor left, Alex Taylor, and Kate Taylor with Alex Taylor's son Sweet Baby James - 1971 

In class, Alex and I were both hyper kids who probably spent more time sitting in The Little Red School House punishment corner than all the rest of the children there combined. We were also the cut-up bane of the parents who took turns collecting us at the end of the school day, an act we would encore during later years in such venues as Mrs. Bagby's social dance class at Chapel Hill Country Club and the bus to and from Durham Academy. Most of those disruptions involved our imitations of people, pop songs, rhythms and sounds, all of which got an early start at The Little Red School House.

On days when Alex' mother gathered him at LRSH, I'd sometimes go to his house and play until picked up by my parents and vice versa. We both lived in the country at that time, he because his parents, I would later hear, wanted to live in rural surroundings, we because it was affordable. The Taylors were far better off than most in Chapel Hill. They lived outside of Carrboro when they first moved to the area, a blue collar town then that most Chapel Hillians looked down on. As for us, we lived at what seemed like the other end of existence off East Franklin Street in a rented house above a marsh where Eastgate Shopping Center would be built years later.

Alex Taylor at microphone and James Taylor to his left on guitar as the Fabulous Corsairs in Chapel Hill 1964

That strip of higher ground was an old dairy farm owned by Seton Lloyd and his wife. They still grazed several cows that needed milking which Alex and I got to do under Mr. Lloyd's supervision while he sipped moonshine. Lloyd's main business was a Carrboro general store at 118 East Main Street that was chock full of used pick handles, horse collars, stuff the Union Army left behind and God knows what else, which included homemade whiskey on the sly. Mr. Lloyd was one of the few people in Chapel Hill that probably never had to buy gasoline since he could just exhale into his car's fuel tank. I suppose that's why Alex's and my parents declined his occasional kind offer to drive Alex home since he was "goin' that way anyhow."

Alex and I only saw each other a time or two each week during most of our elementary years since we attended our respective public schools, but we saw each other enough to pick up wherever we had left off before. That changed during seventh grade when we found ourselves on the same bus each day traveling from Chapel Hill to Durham. He attended Durham Academy on Duke Street while I went to a different private school a couple of blocks away on Duke. By that time rock 'n roll was about all that mattered to us and we were pumped for new sounds.

We found them by listening to the radio at night. Quite a few boys then twisted the AM dial when they were supposed to be sleeping to find the 50,000 watt signals that skipped in on the ionosphere when the weather got cold from hundreds or a thousand or more miles away. WKBW, Buffalo. WOWO, Fort Wayne, Indiana. WFAA, Dallas. WABC, New York were but a few of them. I think I was the first to "discover" Cousin Brucie and his odd, sing-song DJ delivery on WABC, tell Alex and then drive everyone crazy on the bus with our imitation, but the big find and fav was WLAC in Nashville.

This is Alex Taylor's first album With Neighbors and Friends released in 1971. It is his best album, and sadly no longer available.

This wasn't ordinary rock music from a far off city, WLAC spewed soul quenchers that neither Alex or I had heard before except in milder form on Durham's WSSB. "Daddy Rabbit" Bobbit and the others there were playing Frankie Lymon and Little Anthony and Micky and Sylvia before WKIX came along. Alex and I even visited "Daddy Rabbit" after school once when Alex accompanied me to my weekly choir practice at Durham's First Presbyterian Church. But WSSB's watered down stuff just wouldn't do once we got onto WLAC. It played the originals the music industry ripped-off and diluted to make commercial hits.

On that station, Hoss Allen, Big Hugh Baby and other disc jockeys played the likes of Howlin' Wolf, Lightnin' Hopkins, Lead Belly, Slim Harpo, Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Lowell Fulson, Little Junior Parker, The Spaniels and Sonny Boy Williamson from record packages put together by Ernie's Record Mart in Nashville that we could order for not much money. Whoaaa. What a world changer.

Alex Taylor of Chapel Hill at his creative and vocal prime

You gotta remember the times. This music was beyond the Elvis and Everly Brothers Kemp Nye hated and wouldn't sell. It was light years away from the the Bo Diddly many white adults said was only fit for juke joint colored people. It was in the class of the Gandy dancer chants I'd heard and tried to imitate to Alex and some others. That is to say, it contained the key to the soul that gave Chapel Hill's Lincoln High School band that extra something that the all white Chapel Hill High School band didn't get.

Alex did get it and he put it into his music. I only wish he'd gotten the acclaim he deserved and lived to enjoy it.

Dan Gifford is an Emmy winning investigative reporter who was also nominated for an Oscar for his documentary Waco: The Rules of Engagement. He is also an actor who has appeared in the films Contact, Mad City, and Malcolm X, and television shows including The X Files and The Practice.

Pictures and music provided by Charly Mann