About Taylor Gordon

Born in 1893 into the only African American family living in White Sulphur Springs, Montana, Emmanuel Taylor Gordon (1893-1971) became an internationally famous singer in the 1920s. In his 1929 autobiography Born to Be Gordon tells of the many adventures and misadventures he experienced during the first 30-some years of his life, covering his early years in Montana, his relationship with Ringling Brothers’ circus impresario John Ringling, for whom he worked as the personal porter on Ringling’s private railway car, and his eventual rise to national and international fame in the 1920s singing spirituals as part of group led by J. Rosamond Johnson (who arranged the songs for piano and voice and who, with his brother James Weldon Johnson, compiled The Book of American Negro Spirituals). Well-known during the Harlem Renaissance, Gordon was a crucially important figure in popularizing African American spirituals as an art form. Gordon and Johnson’s performances gave many Americans and Europeans their first experience of black spirituals. One of the era’s premier vocal interpreters of black music, Taylor Gordon has been all but forgotten.