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James Taylor managed to grow up in two of the most beautiful places in America. Boyhood winters were spent in a specially designed eleven-room house on 28 acres of North Carolina woodland and pasture near Chapel Hill. His hard-working doctor father, Isaac ("Ike") Taylor, independently wealthy and from an old Scottish-Southern family, was busily working his way up to the deanship of the University of North Carolina Medical School. "We quite consciously set out to raise our children free of the hang-ups we see in ourselves and our generation," Dr. Taylor explained recently. "We weren't going to use that cop-out of 'because the Bible tells you so.' " James' mother, Trudy Taylor, is the daughter of a Massachusetts fisherman and boat builder who before her marriage trained seriously as a lyric soprano. She had seen fondness for music so tormented by formal training that, though James, Livingston, Alex and Kate all took up various instruments (violin, cello, piano), they seldom took lessons for long. Mrs. Taylor did not go to church. Instead, she taught her children "to believe in people," and long before ecology became a household word, she encouraged them to nourish a pantheistic sense that the earth is a "beautiful, fragile place." As a very little boy James was greatly affected by the Bible Belt religion he heard at school. Mrs. Taylor remembers how he needed reassurance that he would not burn in hell for his sins.
Faith in Day-to-Day Goodness
Any wintry doubts the young Taylors might have entertained on the subject of natural beauty were dispelled during summers on Martha's Vineyard at the family's big house in Chilmark, hard by the long breakers and sandy wastes of South Beach. In those days there was plenty of everything, including time and money. John Sheldon, a friend of Livingston Taylor, remembers that many days were passed taking apart motorboat engines and trying to soup them up. "We dropped a few overboard," he says, "but ruining expensive stuff was the usual. Ike always provided replacements." In those days, too, Dr. Taylor led in singing sea chanteys and folk songs at cookouts on the beach. At 15, James, along with Danny Kootch, won a hootenanny contest, singing and accompanying themselves with harmonica and guitar. In their early teens, Livingston and James used to turn up at the Chilmark Community Center square dances. Friends recall that the Taylors as a family seemed touched by a special energy and grace—particularly the boys.