Marlin Taylor

Marlin Taylor

After serving a stint in the United States Army, Marlin Taylor got his start in radio in 1961 as program director at WHFS-FM in Bethesda, Maryland. The station itself was brand new at the time. Stereo radio broadcasts were the latest thing in 1961 so Taylor assembled a playlist of classical stereo recordings.

Taylor moved to WDVR in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1963 to become their station manager. While there, Taylor developed/invented the style of radio programming that came to be known as "Beautiful Music" featuring instrumental arrangements presented in theme-based, 15-minutes sets.

Taylor's next move came in 1966 when he began programming The Concert Network which aired on WBCN in Boston, Massachusetts and WHCN in Hartford, Connecticut. Over the next few years, he worked at WJIB in Boston, Massachusetts and WRFM in New York, New York where his Beautiful Music format became a hit and was syndicated across the nation and internationally in Canada and Australia.

As trends in radio programming shifted during the 1980s and 1990s, stations began dropping the Beautiful Music format, and at the same time, Taylor was ready to make a change. His contract finished at the end of 1987 and for the next several years, he devoted his time to supporting the music ministry of his wife Alicia, a professional singer.

In 2000, after an absence of more than a decade from radio, Taylor was hired by XM radio, to program their Big Band channel. In 2004, XM management responded to subscriber demand for a Southern Gospel channel, yet had no plans to employ a experienced manager. Taylor, who admittedly was unfamiliar with the genre, offered to head the channel. Taylor built the channel called enLighten over the next decade, seeing it through a couple of crises after XM's merger with Sirius when the management threatened to take it off the air. He retired in 2015.

In 2018, Taylor published an autobiography titled Radio…My Love, My Passion.

Awards

2021 - Southern Gospel Music Association Hall Of Fame