The mother of Grammy-winning singer-songwriter James Taylor has died. Gertrude Woodard Taylor was 92.
His mother died over the weekend surrounded by four generations of family at her home “overlooking her beloved Stonewall Pond” in Chilmark on Martha’s Vineyard, the Fire & Rain singer said on his website.
Her daughter Kate Taylor told the Vineyard Gazette that their mother died of complications from old age.
“She devoted her life to her marriage and her five children, four boys and a girl,” James Taylor posted on his website. Three of those children — James, Kate and Livingstone — became professional musicians.
Trudy, as his mother was known, was also “an accomplished painter, a weaver [spinning her own yarn], a photographer, a distinguished horticulturist and a killer cook, whose talents in the kitchen were celebrated by anyone fortunate enough to sit at her table,” James Taylor wrote.
A Massachusetts native and the daughter of a commercial fisherman, she married Isaac Taylor, dean of the University of North Carolina’s medical school. Isaac Taylor died in 1995.
She raised her family in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Martha’s Vineyard.
She is survived by four children and multiple grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She was also predeceased by one son.
Memorial services were pending.
