Description

As part of one of the most famous musical families in America, Sister Kate Taylor has had a musical career uniquely her own.
After recording 3 albums and going out on nation-wide tours in the 70s, Kate Taylor settled into a quieter home life on Martha’s Vineyard. After visiting a friend’s tipi, Kate set out to make a tipi of her own, where she and her husband Charlie Witham and their growing family lived for several summers.
While she had a hiatus from touring and recording, she never stopped singing and she and Charlie continued to write songs. This documentary is an exploration of life on Martha’s Vineyard through the songs they wrote over a span of decades of living and raising a family there. In
Kate Taylor: Tunes from the Tipi and other Songs from Home
, Kate shares her stories of a simpler world viewed through the flaps of a tipi canvas.
Though the film is primarily based on Martha’s Vineyard, it begins with family footage of the Taylor’s home where Kate grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. While her father, Dr. Isaac Taylor was the dean of the medical school at the University of North Carolina, he and her mother, Trudy Taylor, raised Kate and her brothers Alex, James, Livingston and Hugh Taylor. The film explores her childhood musical influences, how she and her siblings all gravitated towards music and how the Taylor clan came to settle on the island of Martha’s Vineyard.
Taylor family home movies of Martha’s Vineyard from the 60s reveal both how much the island has changed, as well as how much still remains the same. The film weaves home movies, archival photos and current documentary footage with dynamic concert performances and acoustic field recordings from the tipi Ms. Taylor once called home. This superb documentary captures Kate Taylor s rich musical history, endearing spirit and the inspiration behind her wonderfully crafted songs about home.
The documentary was produced and directed by Taylor s daughter and son-in-law, award-winning filmmakers Liz Witham and Ken Wentworth. Witham and Wentworth founded DocuTunes.TV with the idea of combining documentary and music as a way of showing life through song.