Merle “Red” Taylor

Musician · 1927–1987 · Saltillo, Mississippi
Best known for Fiddle

Merle “Red” Taylor was a fiddler from northeast Mississippi who played for Bill Monroe in three stints during the 1950s. He was the fiddler on Monroe’s first recording of “Uncle Pen” in October 1950 and on “Raw Hide” and “Poison Love” in January 1951, and he was one of the three fiddlers on Monroe’s 1954 remake of “Blue Moon of Kentucky.”

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He was born on 19 May 1927 in Saltillo, Mississippi, north of Tupelo, and learned old-fashioned hoedowns on the fiddle as a child. At fifteen he had his own show on WELO in Tupelo. He then went to Blytheville, Arkansas, with Tommy “Butterball” Paige’s troupe, and later to Nashville, where he worked in Cousin Wilbur’s show and with Little Jimmy Dickens and Hank Williams.

His first recordings with Monroe were made at Castle Studio in the Tulane Hotel in Nashville on 15 October 1950, with Jimmy Martin on guitar, Rudy Lyle on banjo and Joel Price on bass: “Uncle Pen,” Monroe’s song about his fiddling uncle, Pendleton Vandiver, and “When the Golden Leaves Begin to Fall.” The same band returned on 20 January 1951 for “Letter from My Darlin’,” “On the Old Kentucky Shore,” the mandolin instrumental “Raw Hide” and “Poison Love,” with Martin singing lead and Monroe tenor. Back with Monroe in 1954, he joined Gordon Terry and Charlie Cline in a three-fiddle section: on 26 June they recorded “Close By,” “My Little Georgia Rose” and “Put My Little Shoes Away,” and on 4 September the faster new “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” cut after Elvis Presley’s version of the song, with Edd Mayfield on guitar and Ernie Newton on bass.

That November he played on two other bands’ first sessions in Nashville. On 7 November 1954 at Castle Studio he was the fiddler for Hylo Brown, with Joe Drumwright on banjo, Gordon Terry on mandolin and Howard Watts on bass, and the session gave Brown his first single, “Lost to a Stranger.” On 16 November, at RCA Victor’s Nashville studio with Steve Sholes producing, he played for Jimmy Martin and Bobby and Sonny Osborne, with Cedric Rainwater on bass, a session that produced “Save It! Save It!,” “Chalk Up Another One” and “20/20 Vision.”

Taylor recorded for Decca under his own name in the mid-1950s. In 1975 he made Taylor Made for the Hi label, an album of his fiddling, and in the 1980s he made two albums for Old Homestead, one of them with the Dobro player Josh Graves. Gordon Terry, who had recommended him to Monroe, described his style as a slow bow with a lot of left-hand finger work. Merle Taylor died on 3 May 1987, aged 59.

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