Robert Taylor was born in a small town in Texas in 1939. He graduated high school in 1964 and by that time had already held odd jobs as a gardener and paperboy and worked at a shoe store, a nursing home, a drug store and a bowling alley. Taylor was drafted into the military, trained in Louisiana and learned radio/TV repair, fought and was captured for a time in Vietnam, and served on a base in California. After his service, he worked for several years as a station porter for the New York City Transit Authority, as a shipping/receiving clerk in a hospital, and for the United States Postal Service. When he moved to Brooklyn's Crown Heights neighborhood in the 1970s, Taylor's first apartment was a shared studio. One of his roommates became his wife, and they moved to their own apartment in the Flatbush neighborhood. Taylor frequented the jazz nightclub Blue Coronet (1965 - 1985) in Bedford-Stuyvesant and other bars, and alcoholism took a toll and ended his marriage. At the time of the interview in 2010, Taylor was retired and had been a resident of Marcus Garvey Nursing Home for one year.