Photo: Otis Taylor | By John Moore, Denver Gazette | Otis Taylor can’t honestly tell you that getting kicked out of Denver’s Manual High School 57 years ago gave him the blues. He is Otis Taylor, after all: The blues were always inside him.
No, being told to cut his hair – or else – just two months before graduating with the Class of 1966 simply gave Taylor and his 17-year-old head of gloriously unconstrained hair a head start on his dream of playing the blues somewhere along L.A.’s Sunset Strip.
Clearly, Taylor chose “or else.”
“I wish I could tell you some horrible story about how I couldn’t sleep for months after I got kicked out of school,” Taylor, 74, said last week from his home in Boulder. “But I was just like, ‘I’ll go to California!’ It meant that I could go sooner.”
To be sure, people were upset. “My mother was upset,” Taylor said. “My father was upset. My grandmother was upset. Everybody was upset.
Otis was not all that upset.
“It was the ‘60s,” said Taylor, which tells you pretty much all you need to know about the times he was living in. Still, Taylor was an admittedly unusual kid for those times. He got good grades. He never got into trouble. He did not drink or do drugs.
“But I was kind of eccentric,” he said. “I used to ride my unicycle to school while playing the banjo in a suit and tie.”
You read that right. There’s even a photo in the Dec. 10, 1964, edition of The Denver Post showing Taylor making the 1.2-mile ride to school with his banjo on his knee.
“Kids would laugh at me, but nobody ever hassled me or beat me up about it,” said Taylor, who was born in Chicago and moved to Denver with his parents after his uncle was shot to death. He admits he was kind of a strange kid from kind of a strange family. “My parents weren’t beatniks. They were more bee-boppers,” he said. “They weren’t hippies. They were subterranean.”
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There’s a legendary story about the day Taylor’s mother sent her 14-year-old son to the new Denver Folklore Center, then located at 17th Avenue and Washington Street, just a few blocks from the Taylor home right across the street from where the Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Theatre is now.
“Basically, my mother had a ukulele, and I broke a string,” he said. “So I went to the Folklore Center to get it fixed – and I never really left. I was just fascinated by the place. I started going there every day after school.” Store owner Harry Tuft took Taylor in, and he encouraged his staff to give the youngster tips between their scheduled classes. “That’s how I learned how to play the banjo – and I never paid for a lesson,” Taylor said.
Taylor’s life took a hairpin turn when a Manual High School administrator gave him the surprise ultimatum that would cost him his diploma. Taylor stood firm – and not because he cared much about the consequences for refusing to cut his hair. He just didn’t want to be told what to do with it.
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A few years ago, noted Denver photographer Evan Semón called Taylor to let him know he had spotted a photo of Taylor hanging in a Manual High School hallway trophy case that was dedicated to celebrating notable Thunderbolts graduates through the years. And, as we have established, Taylor is not a Manual graduate.
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Taylor is grateful for all the trouble Anderson, Semón and others have gone to. “But if I’m honest, I probably would’ve been more honored if I had gotten it when I was like … 19,” he said with a laugh.
But now, he’s thinking: Why stop here?”
“Now I’m waiting to get a college degree from somebody,” he joked. “But we better hurry up: I’m going to be 75 in July.”
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[Wish we could reprint the whole article but you can read it here]
https://denvergazette.com/arts-entertainment/for-blues-legend-otis-taylor-a-wrong-will-be-righted-57-years-later-john-moore/
John Moore is the Denver Gazette’s Senior Arts Journalist.
E-mail him at John.Moore@denvergazette.com
COMBO is so happy for its member Otis Taylor who is finally getting an honor that was due to him for his hard work and academic achievements a very long time ago!
Otis writes: Thanks everyone for your kind words and support.
More at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1s5-cxkPQA
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/denver-public-schools-trying-historic-042624711.html
Photo: Otis Taylor (from his website) http://www.otistaylor.com
Denver Public Schools Trying to Right Historic Wrongs for Black Students From Decades Ago – Like Blues Musician Otis Taylor
