For the next two years, Taylor split leads with Paul Foster in the quartet. Jones’s tenure was brief, however, and Taylor was recruited. When Cooke left the Soul Stirrers in mid-1957 to pursue a career in secular music, Johnny Jones of the Swanee Quintet was his immediate replacement. “I had always sang some rhythm and blues,” said Taylor, who credited Junior Parker, Joe Turner, and Louis Jordan as early secular influences. In 1955, he was on Vee-Jay Records, singing with both the 5 Echoes and the Highway Q.C.’s. By 1953, he was in Chicago singing with the 5 Echoes, with whom he made his first record, on the Sabre label. Harris and his Soul Stirrers successor, Cooke, and by Archie Brownlee of the Original Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, he sang as a teenager with the Melody Makers, a gospel quartet in Kansas City, where he’d moved when he was 10. Taylor was born in Crawfordsville, Arkansas and raised in West Memphis, Arkansas, where he began singing in church at age 6. I think anything that makes people happy is good, anything that takes people’s minds off their problems.” “If you sing ‘Jesus’ or if you say ‘baby,’ it’s basically melodically the same. He considered himself a “salesman” of songs. No matter what manner of material he wrapped his elastic low-tenor pipes around, Taylor was a song stylist of remarkable consistency and breathtaking authority. His biggest seller came at Columbia Records in 1976 with “Disco Lady,’ which topped both the pop and r&b charts and became the first-ever single in record industry history to be certified platinum. He signed with Stax Records in 1966 and over the next nine years scored a dozen Top Ten r&b hits. Taylor then recorded blues and soul music with limited commercial success for Cooke’s SAR and Derby labels from 1961 to ’64. Then, in 1957, he joined the Soul Stirrers, filling a role in the famous gospel quartet previously occupied by Sam Cooke.
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In 1955 he joined the Highway Q.C.’s, a Chicago gospel quartet in which both Sam Cooke and Lou Rawls had previously sung lead. His earliest sides, in 1953, were with the 5 Echoes, a Chicago doo-wop group. During a recording career that spanned nearly half a century, Johnnie Taylor (1934-1999) covered more genres of African-American music than any other major artist.