Growing up in Northern England’s Black Country—the region that gave the world Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and John Bonham and Deep Purple’s Glenn Hughes—Joanne Shaw Taylor wasn’t especially fond of the British blues-rock records her father played at home.
“Dad was a frustrated blues guitarist and harmonica player who would have loved to have done that, but since he had a wife and children, he had to get a real job,” Taylor said in a recent interview. “My mother had been a professional ballroom dancer in her late teens and early twenties, until she met my dad, who had two right feet. It was just your typical working-class upbringing, but they were both brilliant, and very supportive of me and my brother and what I’ve done, so I got very lucky.”
Yet the music resonated and stuck.
“I don’t want to say I struggled to get into the 1960s British blues boom,” she said, “but growing up, I just heard so much of it around the house, because my dad was that sort of typical English teenager that had grown up seeing the Stones and Jimi Hendrix on Top of the Pops.”
Instead, Taylor was drawn to Texas blues, an influence that has stayed with her throughout a career that includes multiple chart-topping albums and awards, including the Best Female Vocalist at the British Blues Awards.
“It was Stevie Ray Vaughan who sent me down the rabbit hole,” she recalled. “And then Stevie Ray Vaughan led to Albert Collins, who then led to Freddie King. So I was listening to a lot of American blues artists, which was already kind of strange for a 13-year-old girl from England to be doing.”
What Taylor ultimately absorbed from existing British counterparts was the realization that artists could come from working-class towns and find real-world success.
“Here were these other people who had come from the same place and gone on to have such important roles in music,” said Taylor, who moved to Detroit and now lives in Nashville. “I think it was sort of an encouragement, like, ‘Well, he did it. So why can’t I?’”
Over the past few years, Taylor has maintained a busy touring schedule, has been working on improving her vocals while also finding time to hit the studio, releasing her current album, Black & Gold, in 2025, just a year after her previous release, Heavy Soul. The former album was produced by Kevin Shirley, who also worked extensively with Taylor’s friend and mentor, Joe Bonamassa.
When it comes to recording, Shirley is known for being fast and focused, a very different approach than the one Taylor would normally take on her own.
“I’m a massive procrastinator,” she admitted. “I can’t do anything unless I’m down to the wire. So I think for me—I mean, everybody’s different—but recording very quickly does tend to focus the mind on what is important and what’s not, and what’s good and what isn’t.”
While Taylor has enjoyed considerable success in her career, it was not without sacrifices along the way. A few years after her mother passed away, Taylor collapsed on stage from exhaustion and had to be carried off on a stretcher.
“I was definitely in bad shape,” she recalled. “I was in a really bad management deal at the time as well, where I didn’t have access to my own bank account, and was just being worked very hard. I had this chest infection, and management just kept wanting me to keep touring. I’d never really had time to grieve my mom, so it all kind of compounded into me not being in good mental health, and therefore physical health.”
Her father had to step in and secretly get her a plane ticket home.
Taylor has since channeled that grief into “Fade Away,” a deeply personal and emotional song that she plays live alongside fan favorites like “Watch ’em Burn” and “Dyin’ to Know.”
“I really enjoy performing ‘Fade Away’ live, because I’m thinking about who in the audience has gone through this but doesn’t have the luxury of being able to do the same thing and write a song about it,” she says. “It’s quite a therapeutic thing and just a lovely thing to be able to share.”
Joanne Shaw Taylor plays the Fountain Blues & Brews Festival at Plaza de Cesar Chavez on June 27th.
