LANCE
TAYLOR
Lance Taylor followed Bob Dylan backward to Woody Guthrie and carried the connection forward to Key West, transforming one Oklahoma detour into a song that joins two distant Route 1 stops.
FOLLOWING THE SONG BACKWARD
Born in Honolulu in 1973, Lance Taylor grew up in a Navy family that moved frequently. His first instrument was trombone. A baseball scholarship took him to West Virginia Wesleyan College, but music eventually displaced sports. The decisive turn arrived at Woodstock’s 25th anniversary, where seeing Bob Dylan sent him toward the guitar.
Back in Maryland, Lance studied music at Salisbury State University and learned Dylan’s repertoire through the Annapolis blues-jam circuit. He drove across the state playing open microphones, developing the persistence and independence that would later define his life as a working Key West musician.
THE STREET AS A STAGE
Lance moved to Key West in 2001. With a battery-powered amplifier, he played on the street for six or seven hours a day. Busking offered something the tourist stages could not: the freedom to play whatever he wanted for as long as the song required.
His recording practice grew from a home setup into a professional studio. More than two decades into his musical life, Lance became a resident artist at The Studios of Key West, continuing to write and explore how recording could make a song sound larger than life.
DYLAN, CROOKS & WOODY
In Key West, Lance encountered drummer Richard Crooks, the New York session musician who played on Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks. The meeting brought Dylan’s recorded history into Lance’s immediate musical world.
The line stretched farther back when Lance drove through Okemah, Oklahoma, Woody Guthrie’s hometown. He stopped for a day, looking for the idea that would unlock a song. A fellow musician’s observation—that Woody was punk rock—made the connection snap into place.
WOODY GUTHRIE WAS THE FIRST PUNK ROCKER
For Lance, the comparison was not a stunt. Guthrie’s radical politics, refusal of polite boundaries, direct language and willingness to place himself beside working people carried the attitude of punk decades before the genre acquired its name. Lance turned that recognition into one of his defining songs.
The song became far larger inside the Route 1 Project. Motherlode encountered Lance in Key West, then carried “Woody Guthrie Was the First Punk Rocker” north to Beluthahatchee—the Florida home of Stetson Kennedy, where Woody lived, worked and wrote. What began as Lance’s road song became the bridge between two Field Reports.
RADIO FREE KEY WEST
The Route 1 encounter was also a return. Years before the 2017 expedition, Charles White’s Radio Free Key West presented Full Moon Parties at El Alamo, including a December 2009 performance by the Michael Dixon Band—Lance Taylor’s former group. The surviving artwork establishes that Lance was already part of Chuck’s Key West cultural network before the Route 1 Project had a name.
That changes the discovery. Lance was not a stranger found at the southern end of the highway. He was part of an earlier story returning with new meaning.
