James Talley
American country blues and electric blues singer-songwriter
James Talley (born November 9, 1944) is an American country, country blues and electric blues singer-songwriter.
Biography
Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Talley is an artist whose vision of the American experience, as author David McGee has said, is "startlingly original." As a youth, Talley's family moved from their home in Mehan, Oklahoma, near Stillwater, to Washington state, where his father worked as a chemical operator in the Hanford plutonium factory. After five years in Richland, Washington, and realizing the hazards his father's employment presented, the family relocated to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Talley graduated from the University of New Mexico with a degree in fine arts.
After college, encouraged by Pete Seeger while on a trip to New Mexico, Talley began to write songs that drew upon the culture of the Southwest. These early songs eventually became The Road to Torreón, a saga of life and death in the Chicano villages of northern New Mexico. Released in a boxed edition by Bear Family Records in 1992, it was a collaboration of photography and music, with a photographic essay contributed by Talley's lifelong friend, photographer Cavalliere Ketchum.
In 1968, Talley moved from New Mexico to Nashville, Tennessee to try to get his songs released. Over the years Johnny Cash, Johnny Paycheck, Gene Clark, Alan Jackson, Hazel Dickens, and most recently Moby, have recorded his songs. His album Got No Bread, No Milk, No Money, But We Sure Got a Lot of Love was released during an era when outlaw country was gaining ground in Nashville.
“James Talley” enters the record as american country blues and electric blues singer-songwriter. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what James, Talley and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“James Talley” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, James, Talley and American provides the most credible route into that argument.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1681169. VIAF identifies the subject as 4130726. The Library of Congress control number is n92088689. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1944, 1992 and 1968.
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This entry incorporates text from “James Talley” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.