Le’Shawn Taylor bought his first vinyl at Goodwill in 2012.
He said he was inspired by Questlove after seeing a video of the artist’s collection on YouTube.
“I don’t think at the time I had a record player,” he said. “I was just buying.”
It has been over a decade since he purchased that first vinyl that planted a seed.
Record-collecting has blossomed into a near full-time passion for Taylor.
From 2018-2020, that passion manifested in Vibes and Stuff, a brick-and-mortar in Taylor’s hometown of Valdosta, GA.
The name of his store was an homage to the song off A Tribe Called Quest’s “The Low End Theory.”
Taylor said he knew he was different growing up in Valdosta. His store was an extension of that eccentricity.
“[I was] just into like the opposite of things that were cool,” he said. “I’m probably like the only person in bell-bottoms in like a hundred-mile radius.”
Vibes and Stuff was a safe space for kids like him — the ones who stuck out like a sore thumb in South Georgia.
But Taylor was struggling to break even, and his loved ones would ask him about that.
“They’d be like, ‘Yo bro, are you making enough to keep this a thing?’” he said. “And I’m like, ‘Not really,’ so then what’s the point?”
Also — and maybe more importantly — people were not buying the music that he cared about most.
“I strategically placed my jazz and funk section so that when people walked in, they would see that first [and] it could get some love,” he said.
But folks routinely walked right past that music, passing up names like Doug Carn and Pharoh Sanders for The Beatles and Steely Dan.
So, in 2020, Taylor changed course.
“It came to the idea of like, let me just do all Black music,” he said. “Curate the best selection of Black music that I possibly can.”
That is when Stokely’s Records was born.
“Being able to gift records to people that have inspired me to do what I do is amazing. That’s just like me handing them off like they’re flowers. ”
Le’Shawn Taylor, founder of Stokely’s Records
Unlike Vibes and Stuff, Stokely’s is a pop-up shop.
Between pop-ups, Taylor runs the business online. With that, he found a new freedom.
“I could literally pick this up and take it wherever I want to take it,” he continued. “Which is incredible.”
One of the places Taylor takes it is For Keeps, a Black bookstore on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta.
Owner Rosa Duffy lets Taylor host his pop-ups there, selling his records in a place that he feels like he fits in.
Taylor still lives at home, but he said every visit to Atlanta is a cup-filling respite from his small town on the Florida-Georgia line.
Taylor also says the feeling of a pop-up never gets old, especially given how much energy he puts into getting his collection ready for show.
“It be chilling in your room forever,” he said. “And to see everything that took you a year to build up leave within under 40 minutes of being open is insane.”
The last pop-up happened on a cold January afternoon.
“The fact that I had Black folks out in 20-degree weather buying old vinyl records is insane,” he continued. “I don’t know a lot of people that can say that they’ve done that before.”
For Taylor, moments like that are rare.
“At a lot of these shows and a lot of these stores that I go to, I be the only Black dude in the room,” he said. “I’m seeing all this Black music being sold and traded and everything, but ain’t nobody Black selling it or involved in the monetary process at all. And that is weird.”
That is why Taylor said the work that he does is so important.
“People like to exclude our contributions to culture all over the world,” he said. “[But] music would have been so different without Black folks.”
For now, Stokely’s Records is not Taylor’s full-time gig, but he’s working towards that, and things are working out.
“The stuff that I’ve been able to do within the past few months has been insane,” he said. “I’m up here chatting with Questlove on my lunch break at Publix bro, about records and stuff. That is insane. That does not happen.”
“Being able to gift records to people that have inspired me to do what I do is amazing,” he said. “That’s just like me handing them off like they’re flowers.
As Stokely’s grows in time, Taylor said its mission will never change.
“This is what I want to do until I can’t do it no more,” he continued.
“People like to exclude our contributions to culture all over the world — music would have been so different without Black folks.”
Le’Shawn Taylor, founder of Stokely’s Records
He said Stokely’s will always be a space where Blackness is front and center because the business is an extension of himself.
“I love being Black man,” Taylor said. “I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”
