Taj Mahal Shares His Deep Passion For Music: “I’ve Never Known Life and Breathing Without Music”

The great American musician, Taj Mahal (born Henry Saint Clair Fredericks), is, at heart, an essentialist. The music he loves is often the distilled essence of a genre or style, rather than the pomp and circumstance that can be fashioned out of it.

Sometimes that means putting a subtle but modern spin on an old folk or blues classic. Sometimes that can mean just playing the root, third and fifth the way the first blues men and women did it hundreds of years ago. In that same way, Mahal, who was born in Harlem, New York, and raised in Springfield, Massachusetts, has labored many of his adult years as a farmer, working the earth, growing crops and looking after livestock. This is important stuff, he reminds. And he’s right. It builds soul and character from the earth up. 

American Songwriter caught up with the 78-year-old Mahal to ask him about how he first came to music, what it was like for him to toil on farms, why he’s intrigued by Hawaiian culture and what he loves most about music.