50 facts about James Taylor: wrote his first song on guitar at age 14, and continued to learn the instrument effortlessly

He has sold over 100 million albums throughout his career, beginning in 1968. Learn 50 facts about Taylor.

1. For more than forty years Taylor has been a compass for his fans, articulating moments of pain and joy, and letting his listeners know that they are not alone.

2. As a recording and touring artist, Taylor has set a precedent to which countless young musicians have aspired.

3. His warm baritone is among the most recognized voices in popular music and his distinctive style of guitar-playing has been enormously influential.

4. He has sold over 100 million albums throughout his career, beginning in 1968 when he was signed to The Beatles' Apple Records.

5. In 1971, Taylor was featured on the cover of Time magazine, heralded as the harbinger of the singer-songwriter era.

6. He has earned 40 gold, platinum, and multi-platinum awards and five Grammy Awards for a catalog that runs from James Taylor and Sweet Baby James to Hourglass and October Road.

7. His first Greatest Hits album earned the Recording Industry Association of America's elite Diamond Award, given for sales in excess of 10 million units in the United States.

8. For his artistic accomplishments, Taylor was honored with the 1998 Century Award, Billboard magazine's highest accolade, bestowed for distinguished creative achievement.

9. Taylor released his breakthrough album Sweet Baby James in 1970.

10. Sweet Baby James went triple-platinum and spawned his first top 10 hit, the intensely personal "Fire and Rain."

11. The following year saw the release of another million-seller, Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon, with the No. 1 single "You've Got a Friend," written by his longtime friend Carole King.

12. The recording won a Grammy Award in 1971 for Best Pop Male Vocal.

13. In 1972, Taylor scored another gold album with One Man Dog, followed up in 1973 with Walking Man.

14. Following his final Warner Brothers recording, In the Pocket, Taylor moved on to Columbia Records and released a string of critically praised and commercially successful albums.

15. The year 2000 saw Taylor's induction into both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the prestigious Songwriters Hall of Fame.

16. The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences selected him as its MusiCares Person of the Year in 2006, and his One Man Band was nominated for an Emmy Award in the category of Outstanding Variety, Music, or Comedy Special.

17. In 2008, Taylor released Covers and Other Covers that features Taylor's full band and is his own musical interpretation of tunes from the '50s, '60s and '70s.

18. In May 2010, Taylor released the Live at the Troubadour CD/DVD of his November 2007 live performance with Carole King at the Troubadour nightclub in Los Angeles.

19. Their subsequent Troubadour Reunion tour was one of the most successful concert tours of the decade.

20. Most recently, Morgan Neville's acclaimed documentary, Troubadours: The Rise of the Singer-Songwriter was nominated for the Jury Prize at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and was broadcast on PBS as part of its prestigious American Masters series.

21. In 2012, Taylor was awarded the distinguished Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government.

22. In 2011 he was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama in a ceremony at the White House.

23. In 2011, Taylor was also honored with a Carnegie Hall Perspectives series, which consisted of four concert evenings presented by Carnegie Hall and featuring Taylor and personally selected musical guests.

24. Three months after the National Medal of Arts ceremony, Taylor returned to the White House to perform for President Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel at a state dinner held in the Rose Garden.

25. Although Taylor took a touring hiatus in 2013 to continue work on a new album, he added a private concert for the victim families of Newtown, CT, a memorial service for MIT Officer Sean Collier and an appearance at The One Fund benefit concert in Boston.

26. 2015 saw the release of Before This World, Taylor's new album of original material, his first in over 13 years. Taylor wrote and recorded much of Before This World while touring over the past several years.

27. James Taylor has received honorary doctorates of music from Williams College and the Berklee School of Music.

28. Raised in North Carolina, he lives in western Massachusetts with his wife Caroline and their sons Henry and Rufus.

29. His full name is James Vernon Taylor.

30. His 1976 Greatest Hits album was certified Diamond and has sold 12 million US copies.

31. Taylor was born at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston on March 12, 1948, where his father, Isaac M. Taylor, was a resident physician.

32. His father was from a well-off family of Southerners of Scottish ancestry.

33. His mother, the former Gertrude Woodard, studied singing with Marie Sundelius at the New England Conservatory of Music and was an aspiring opera singer before the couple's marriage in 1946.

34. James was the second of five children.

35. Taylor first learned to play the cello as a child in North Carolina, and switched to the guitar in 1960.

36. His style on that instrument evolved from listening to hymns, carols, and Woody Guthrie, while his technique derived from his bass clef-oriented cello training and from experimenting on his sister Kate's keyboards.

37. He began attending Milton Academy, a prep boarding school in Massachusetts in Fall 1961; summering before then with his family on Martha's Vineyard, he met Danny Kortchmar, an aspiring teenage guitarist from Larchmont, New York.

38. He and Kortchmar began listening to and playing blues and folk music together, and Kortchmar quickly realized that Taylor's singing had a "natural sense of phrasing, every syllable beautifully in time. I knew James had that thing."

39. Taylor wrote his first song on guitar at age 14, and continued to learn the instrument effortlessly.

40. By the summer of 1963, he and Kortchmar were playing coffeehouses around the Vineyard, billed as "Jamie & Kootch".

41. In July 1969 Taylor headlined a six-night stand at the Troubadour in Los Angeles.

42. On July 20 he performed at the Newport Folk Festival as the last act, and was cheered by thousands of fans who stayed in the rain to hear him.

43. Shortly thereafter, he broke both hands and both feet in a motorcycle accident on Martha's Vineyard and was forced to stop playing for several months.

44. But while recovering, he continued to write songs and in October 1969 signed a new deal with Warner Bros. Records.

45. Taylor married fellow singer-songwriter Carly Simon in a small ceremony at her Murray Hill, Manhattan, apartment. A post-concert party following a Taylor performance at Radio City Music Hall turned into a large-scale wedding party, and the Simon-Taylor marriage would find much public attention over the following years.

46. They had two children, Sarah Maria "Sally" Taylor, born January 7, 1974, and Benjamin Simon "Ben" Taylor, born January 22, 1977.

47. During their marriage, the couple would guest on each other's albums and have two hit singles as duets - a cover of Inez & Charlie Foxx's Mockingbird and a cover of The Everly Brothers' Devoted to You.

48. Simon announced her separation from Taylor in September 1981 saying "Our needs are different; it seem[s] impossible to stay together" and their divorce became final in 1983.

49. On December 14, 1985, Taylor married actress Kathryn Walker at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. Walker had helped him get off heroin and Taylor's next albums were partially successful - in 1988, he released Never Die Young, highlighted with the charting title track, and in 1991, the platinum New Moon Shine provided Taylor some popular songs with the melancholic "Copperline" and the upbeat "(I've Got to) Stop Thinkin' About That", both hit singles in the AC radio. Taylor and Walker's divorce took place in 1996.

50. On February 18, 2001, at the Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Boston, Taylor wed for the third time, marrying Caroline ("Kim") Smedvig, the director of public relations and marketing for the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Source: jamestaylor.com, Wikipedia.org