Artist · EveryDisc catalogue

Taj Mahal

Henry Saint Clair Fredericks (born 17 May 1942, Harlem, New York), better known as Taj Mahal, is an American musician, singer, and self-taught multi-instrumentalist, one of the outstanding blues performers of the late twentieth century. Taj Mahal, on one hand, played a key role in the revival and preservation of traditional acoustic blues, and on the other, in his work, he expanded the stylistic boundaries of the genre by using motifs from Caribbean, African, and Polynesian musical cultures. Despite the fact that in his study of blues as a part of world musical culture Taj Mahal never broke away from his country-blues roots, many specialists critically commented on his experiments, calling them overly "presumptuous" and "purely academic." The experimenter bluesman received recognition only in the 1990s, when he had followers (Keb' Mo', Guy Davis; sometimes Corey Harris and Alvin Youngblood Hart are included among them). Taj Mahal has been nominated for a Grammy 9 times and won this award three times (in 1997, 2000, and 2018). Each time he received it for winning in the Best Contemporary Blues Album category.