Taj Mahal: A Beginner's Guide | Songlines
Thursday, June 12, 2025

Taj Mahal: A Beginner's Guide

By Nigel Williamson

Nigel Williamson surveys the US musician whose career has long shown that the blues is a global musical movement

Photo Credit Phil Clarkin 08 25 2022 Tajmahal Churchstudio 37

Taj Mahal in The Church Studios, London, 2022

It’s a truism that the blues has its roots in Africa but if you ask Taj Mahal, he will tell you that so did just about every other form of popular music. “I think we need to take the spyglass of anthropology and turn it around the other way and realise that the majority of music that’s popular in the world is based on African music,” he told Paul Freeman in 2012.

In Taj’s book, it’s not just blues but jazz, zydeco, gospel, rock, pop, soul, R&B, reggae and so many more styles which are all “cousins, aunts, uncles, second-, third-, fourth-cousins, cousins by marriage, sister-in-laws and mother-in-laws” of African music. “I see it as family… Go and introduce yourself,” he continued.

Having made his name as a bluesman of rare sensitivity and nuance steeped in the music of Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters and Blind Willie McTell, Taj has over the past 50 years also ventured into Caribbean, Hawaiian, Latin, African and Indian forms, rendering the boundaries of genre and geography porous and irrelevant.

A quarter of a century ago, this frictionless inquisitiveness led him to record the groundbreaking fusion album Kulanjan (1999) with the kora maestro Toumani Diabaté (a remastered reissue of which is on its way). As a summit meeting between Mississippi and Mali tracing blues back to its African roots, it stands alongside Ry Cooder & Ali Farka Touré’s Grammy-winning Talking Timbuktu (1994) .

“If you want to dance, if you want to move, you want to shake, you’re going to have to consider some African music. It’s been that way for thousands of years,” he told Freeman. In fact, Mahal’s one regret is that he didn’t get to play more with Ali Farka Touré – their sole recorded collaborations together being on two tracks on Touré’s The Source (1992). “We played together and recorded a few songs,” he told The Georgia Straight in 2006, “but I always wanted to connect with him at his home. I’m upset [that] a lot more people didn’t really get to share what he had to offer. His presence was so powerful. I could see him across the continent and across the water.”

Other than Cooder, it’s hard to think of any American musician who has done more to embrace the music of the rest of the world than Mahal. Hence, it was fitting that in 2022, the two veterans teamed up to make the collaborative acoustic blues album Get On Board, reprising their first musical encounter in the band The Rising Sons, way back in 1964. Nowhere is Leonardo da Vinci’s assertion that “everything connects” more evident than in the music of Taj Mahal.

Born Henry St Clair Fredericks in Harlem in 1942, he grew up in Massachusetts, the son of a jazz pianist father of Caribbean descent and a gospel-singing schoolteacher mother, who raised him to be proud of his roots. “I was connected with my African ancestry through their stories. My grandparents came from the Caribbean with a strong connection to Africa… one of the things that made me excited from the time I was a child was that clear link between our ancestors and the sounds we hear today,” he told The Georgia Strait.

At an early age, he learnt to play the piano, clarinet, trombone and harmonica. By his early teens, he added guitar to his repertoire. Though studying agriculture at the University of Massachusetts, his interest in the folk music of the Caribbean and West Africa was taking over, and he took his stage name from dreams he had about Mahatma Gandhi. By 1964, after finishing his studies and moving to the West Coast, he was playing with Cooder in the short-lived Rising Sons.

When the band broke up, he launched himself as a solo bluesman via a series of country-blues records for Columbia, for whom he would make a dozen albums. By the mid-1970s, those albums had become more adventurous. On 1974’s Mo’ Roots, he explored calypso and reggae, covering Bob Marley’s ‘Slave Driver’ long before the bien pensants of the rock world had discovered The Wailers.

The following year’s Music Keeps Me Together was even more diverse; try ‘When I Feel The Sea Beneath My Soul’, a magical, joyously lilting instrumental that the West Indies tourist board really should have adopted as its theme tune. In the 1980s, he moved to Hawaii. Disillusioned with the music industry and without a record deal, he formed The Hula Blues Band with local musicians such as Michael Barretto, who said that Taj was simply “fishin’ with the guys and jammin’, enjoying life” and playing the odd show. The Hula Blues Band would subsequently release three albums in the 1990s and early 2000s, following his comeback to recording music in 1987 after a ten-year hiatus.

When he returned to recording, he did so as a true global music adventurer, starting with his appearance on Ali Farka Touré’s The Source; he then recorded Mumtaz Mahal (1996) with lute player N Ravikiran and mohan veena virtuoso VM Bhatt (who had just recorded the Grammy-winning A Meeting By The River with Cooder – everything really does connect).

He followed with Kulanjan, his collaboration with Toumani, which he rated one of the most satisfying musical experiences of his life. “The microphones are listening in on a conversation between a 350-year-old orphan and its long-lost birth parents,” he told blues journalist Art Kipaldi in 2002. “After recording with these Africans, basically, if I don’t play guitar for the rest of my life, that’s fine with me.”

In truth, he had no intention of putting down his guitar, and Mkutano – Taj Mahal Meets the Culture Musical Club of Zanzibar (2005) found him travelling to the Indian Ocean to explore the music of East Africa in collaboration with one of the region’s pre-eminent taarab orchestras. Nor had he finished with the blues; he went on to win a Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Album for 2017’s TajMo, a collaboration with Keb’ Mo’. So satisfying was that collaboration that the two musicians have reunited for this year’s Room On The Porch. But before that, Taj managed to sneak in a collaboration with another kora virtuoso when he toured North America in 2024 with the Gambia’s Sona Jobarteh, each night ending with all the musicians on stage for the finale.

Taj’s relentless performing and collaborating continue to show how the blues has long been just one thread in a coat of many colours. “I’m 93 per cent African,” he told MV Times in 2016. “They’ve removed a lot of people from Africa and spread them around the Western world, and all of these people had to reinvent themselves in their new environments. But we’re still connected by blood. That DNA – there’s music in it.”

Subscribe from only £7.50

Start your journey and discover the very best music from around the world.

Subscribe

View the Current
Issue

Take a peek inside the latest issue of Songlines magazine.

Find out more