James Taylor
American singer and guitarist
James Vernon Taylor (born March 12, 1948) is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist.
Taylor achieved his breakthrough in 1970 with the No. 3 single "Fire and Rain" and had his first No. 1 hit in 1971 with his recording of "You've Got a Friend", written by Carole King in the same year. Taylor's 1976 Greatest Hits album was certified Diamond and has sold 11 million copies in the US alone, making it one of the best-selling albums in US history.
Following his 1977 album JT, Taylor has retained a large audience over the decades. Every album that he released from 1977 to 2007 sold over 1 million copies; his combined album and single sales in the US is certified at 33 million. Taylor enjoyed a resurgence in chart performance during the late 1990s and 2000s, when he recorded some of his most-awarded work including Hourglass, October Road, and Covers. Taylor achieved his first number-one album in the US in 2015 with Before This World.
He is known for his cover versions, such as "How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You)" and "Handy Man", as well as originals such as "Sweet Baby James". He played the leading role in Monte Hellman's 1971 film Two-Lane Blacktop. A six-time Grammy Award winner, Taylor was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000.
“James Taylor” enters the record as american singer and guitarist. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what James, Taylor and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“James Taylor” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, James, Taylor and American provides the most credible route into that argument.
Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q310300. VIAF identifies the subject as 35352272. The Library of Congress control number is nr89010658. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1948, 1970, 1971 and 1976.
Public reputation and documentary evidence do not always develop together; absence from a summary is not evidence of historical absence. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “James Taylor” 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.