Otis Taylor was born in Chicago in 1948 . In the 1950s his family moved to Denver. It was there that Taylor met musicians at Harry Tuft’s Denver Folklore Center who taught him to play various instruments, including guitar, banjo, and harmonica. Taylor used these instruments to express himself through the blues, a genre of American music with deep roots in African-American culture.

By 1964, Taylor founded The Butterscotch Fire Department Blues Band, followed by several other groups throughout the 1960s and 70s. In 1977 he decided to take an indefinite break from the business side of the music business. He did not quit playing his guitar. While he coached a bicycle race team and focused on his antiques business, Taylor continued writing blues songs for his own enjoyment. In 1995, he returned to his original profession with an album titled Blue Eyed Monster, followed in 1998 with the critically acclaimed When Negroes Walked the Earth. Most recently, his album White African, released in 2001, has garnered international attention. Taylor’s blues have a distinctly historical flavor, as he writes songs that can only be described as fascinating stories about the American experience. As one reviewer put it, Taylor’s When Negroes Walked the Earth provides a “beautiful history lesson about the contribution of black people to America’s history.”

Taylor’s song “Bowlegged Charlie” tells the story of a black cowboy in the Old West who goes into a big city and manages to get himself into a heap of trouble with a woman and the law before attempting to run back to his ranch. Historians have long noted that, regardless of the absence of blacks in western film and fiction, they were ubiquitous throughout the region’s ranches and on cattle drives. Although some historians’ estimates that as much as 25% of western cowboys were black is debatable, it is clear that African Americans played a vital role in moving cattle across the region in the latter decades of the nineteenth-century. Many black cowboys wielded great skill, honed over the years as slaves and freedmen in herding cattle throughout Texas and the South. Blacks working cattle in Colorado, Kansas, the Dakotas, or elsewhere in the region, were like millions before and after them who sought a better life in the West. Although some have argued that whites brought their prejudices with them when they came west, historian Quintard Taylor, the most renowned scholar to deal with the African American experience in the West, has written that “The workplace racism that permeated plantations in east Texas or the Old South did not exist on the plains.”

1. The blues are often characterized by slow rhythms and a narrator (the singer-story-teller) leaning toward thoughtful, even sad tales. “Bowlegged Charlie” is no exception, dominated by the image of the main character shooting a woman and running from the police. Listen to Taylor’s style in “Bowlegged Charlie,” then look in the newspaper for a story that strikes you as sad. Using as few words as possible, write the lyrics for a blues song based on the story. Tragedy does not “discriminate”; given the common human encounter with misfortune and suffering, to what degree is race a factor in Bowlegged Charlie’s tale?

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