Bobby Taylor, soul singer who helped Jackson 5, dies

Bobby Taylor, who had a hit in 1968 with his own soul group but made his most lasting impact when he helped the Jackson 5 secure a contract with Motown Records, died July 22 in Hong Kong, where he lived.

Taylor and his band, the Vancouvers, had been signed by Berry Gordy Jr., the founder of Motown Records, and had had a Top 40 hit with “Does Your Mama Know About Me?” when he encountered a group of up-and-comers called the Jackson 5.

“He was singing like James Brown,” Mr. Taylor said on the NBC program “Dateline” after Mr. Jackson’s death from a drug overdose in 2009.

The title of the group’s 1969 debut album was “Diana Ross Presents the Jackson 5.”

[...] in a Twitter message after Mr. Taylor’s death, Jermaine Jackson, one of the group’s members, wrote that Mr. Taylor had “put J5 on the path,” and Gordy himself suggested that it was Mr. Taylor who had guided the band to Motown’s studios.

The Music, the Magic, the Memories of Motown, Gordy recalled that he had first heard of the Jackson 5 through his creative assistant, Suzanne de Passe.

An aspiring singer, Mr. Taylor, who had a working knowledge of several instruments and a supple, silken voice, toured with the Four Pharaohs, a doo-wop group based in Columbus, then studied at San Jose State University in California.

Chong, who would gain fame as half of the stoner comedy duo Cheech and Chong, worked with Mr. Taylor for a time in San Francisco before returning to his native Canada.

In a telephone interview, Chong described Mr. Taylor as an outgoing, outspoken person who “could sing everybody else’s songs better than they could themselves.”

In 1968, they released an album, “Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers,” whose tracks included “Malinda,” written by Al Cleveland, Terry Johnson and Smokey Robinson, and “Does Your Mama Know About Me?” by Chong and Tom Baird.

Mr. Taylor released “Taylor Made Soul,” a solo album on the Motown subsidiary label Gordy, in 1969 before leaving Motown in the early 1970s.