Shooby Taylor

William Taylor, who later styled himself the Human Horn under the performing name Shooby Taylor, cultivated an eccentric outsider approach to scat that blended nonsensical syllables, displaced vocal rhythms, and reed-like bleats, attracting a modest yet devoted following. Born September 19, 1929, in Indiana Township, Pennsylvania, he moved to Harlem at eighteen months and carried a childhood stutter that would later influence his vocal phrasing. Drafted into the U.S. Army in 1953, he returned to civilian life two years later and took a position with the U.S. Post Office. A dedicated jazz listener, Taylor idolized scat pioneer Babs Gonzales and sought to replicate that model by enrolling at New York’s Hartnett Music School through GI Bill benefits, training his voice to articulate the instrumental ideas he carried internally. He visited Greenwich Village jam sessions in search of sympathetic players, yet most working musicians rejected or openly ridiculed his singular method.

An injury sustained at work prompted his retirement from the Post Office in the early 1970s; the resulting pension freed him to concentrate entirely on music. He produced numerous private tapes by overdubbing his voice onto existing commercial recordings, almost never adhering to the original melodic line. In 1983 he performed on Amateur Night at the Apollo and was ushered offstage by audience disapproval. During the same period he visited Angel Sound, a drop-in facility in Times Square, where he tracked dozens of selections alongside engineer Craig Bradley; Bradley subsequently compiled fourteen of those performances onto a personal cassette. When Bradley joined New Jersey’s WFMU in 1989 he circulated copies among staff, including Irwin Chusid, presenter of the station’s Incorrect Music Hour.

Chusid programmed the recordings regularly and included a full chapter on Taylor in his 2000 book Songs in the Key of Z. Throughout this period Taylor himself remained unaware of the attention, while admirers had no information about his location or survival. He was then residing in a Newark, New Jersey, nursing home, his activities limited after a stroke in 1994. In July 2002 Elektra Records executive Rick Goetz located Taylor’s son, William Jr.; shortly afterward Goetz and Chusid met the singer at the facility. Taylor appeared on WFMU the following month, and the two visitors transferred additional home recordings to CD-R for preservation. Taylor died on June 4, 2003, at age seventy-four.