Carolina And The Mind Of James Taylor

by Kevin Burton

   You can take the boy from Carolina but you will never extract Carolina from James Taylor.

   That’s how it works. Our inner compass points toward home. When we can’t be there physically, our minds take us there. Sometimes it’s better that way.

   Just as Penny Lane is in the ears and in the eyes of Paul McCartney (who incidentally played bass guitar on Taylor’s track), the sights and sounds of your home are with you in spirit.

   This is common to us all, it’s just that Taylor has a quite uncommon gift for words and tunes and images; a gift for blending the past and present into one soup, with a pinch of possibilities, a dash of what might have been.

    In the same way your mouth waters for dinner, you mind savors the best of Taylor’s musical offerings. Carolina In My Mind is one of them.

   So Carolina is a stopping point for us on our rock and roll road trip we call Coast To Coast. James Taylor is at the wheel.

   Carolina in my Mind didn’t come close to the Top 40 because Taylor was relatively unknown at the time of its 1969 release. Also, according to Wikipedia, he was hospitalized for drug addiction at the time and was unable to promote it.

   Looking backward at Taylor’s work, I hear echoes of his Fire And Rain in the guitar licks, references to the weather and the feel of the song.

   Since I didn’t hear it on the radio, the song was a sweet discovery from a greatest hits compilation. It’s the kind of find that makes you search his catalog for other gems.

    “The song earned critical praise, with Jon Landau‘s April 1969 review for Rolling Stone calling it ‘beautiful’ and one of the ‘two most deeply affecting cuts’ on the album and praising McCartney’s bass playing as ‘extraordinary,” according to Wikipedia.’ “Taylor biographer Timothy White calls the song ‘the album’s quiet masterpiece.’ In a 50-years-later retrospective of the album’s release, Billboard calls the song ‘a stone-classic.’”

  The song is an unofficial state anthem of North Carolina.

   SongFacts says there has been a lot of speculation about the identity of Karin, the woman mentioned in the song. I love the lyric, “ “Karin, she’s a silver sun you’d best walk her way and watch it shine,” but I don’t need to know more than that.

   There is usually a love interest in a song. Taylor has identified Karin as no ordinary woman and I can leave it there.

   Much more useful to me is the poetry in the question “Ain’t it like a friend of mine to hit me from behind?” That line is going to pop up multiple times in your life, long after Karin is forgotten.

   Taylor recorded Carolina In My Mind in London, using spare bits of recording time that the Beatles had but weren’t using. 

   “Taylor wrote it while overseas recording for the Beatles‘ label Apple Records,” according to Wikipedia. “He started writing the song at producer Peter Asher‘s London flat on Marylebone High Street, resumed work on it while on holiday on the Mediterranean island of Formentera, and then completed it while stranded on the nearby island of Ibiza with Karin, a Swedish girl he had just met.”

   The song reflects Taylor’s homesickness with the lyric, “Dark and silent late last night, I think I might have heard the highway calling ..Geese in flight and dogs that bite, and signs that might be omens say I’m going, I’m going I’m gone to Carolina in my mind.”

    The song’s lyric ‘holy host of others standing around me’ makes reference to the Beatles, who were recording The Beatles in the same studio where Taylor was recording his album. Indeed, the recording of Carolina in My Mind includes a credited appearance by Paul McCartney on bass guitar and an uncredited one by George Harrison on backing vocals, according to Wikipedia. 

   “In a 2020 interview with Parade, Taylor stated that ‘Carolina in My Mind’ was his favorite song to perform, explaining, ‘Because my audience responds well to it, and because it wears well, I like ‘Carolina In My Mind’. I play it almost every time I perform, and I haven’t tired of it.”