Baxter Taylor

Baxter Taylor was born in Oklahoma City and grew up in Dallas, Texas, spending summers on the family farm in Fargo, Oklahoma.

While a freshman in college in 1959, Taylor formed a folk band called The Wayfarers with Mason Williams and banjo player Bill Cheatwood, and they became the house band at The Gourd, a coffeehouse in Oklahoma City. As The Wayfarers Trio, they released an album, Songs of the Blue and the Grey, for Mercury Records in 1961. After a couple of years the trio split up, and in 1962 Taylor was a member of The New Christy Minstrels.

After completing military service, Taylor used the royalties from some songs that he had written and returned to college, graduated, and got married. When his twin daughters were born, he went to work for Sears. Several years later, Taylor discovered that his song "Marie Laveau" had become a hit, recorded by Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show in 1971 and Bobby Bare in 1973. In 1975, over 12 years after it was written, Taylor and his co-writer Shel Silverstein received a BMI Songwriting Award for the song. After a brief period in Nashville trying to raise interest for his new songs, Taylor returned to his family in Plano, Texas.

In 1980 Taylor was a semi-finalist in the New Folk Songwriting Contest at the Kerrville Folk Festival. He went on to own a recording studio in Plano called BaxTrax Recording Studio. Taylor retired as a school teacher in 2006.[1]