Taj Mahal

Taj Mahal

From: Berkeley, California, USA.
Style: blues, caribbean, hawaiian
E-mail: tajmahal@tajmahal.com


Taj Mahal -- America's greatest living bluesman -- was born Henry St. Claire Fredericks in Harlem, New York. He was raised in an ethnographically diverse Springfield, Massachusetts by his jazz pianist father of Caribbean descent and his gospel-singing mother, and grew up listening to his father's extensive record collection and music from afar on his father's shortwave radio.

Taj learned to play, in addition to piano, the clarinet, trombone and harmonica, and he loved to sing. He got serious about the guitar when a guitarist from North Carolina moved in next door and taught him the various styles of Muddy Waters, Lightnin' Hopkins, John Lee Hooker and Jimmy Reed and other titans of Delta and Chicago blues.