Carolina in My Mind

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Carolina in My Mind
Written by James Taylor, 1968

Few songs capture homesickness as gently as this one, and it’s fitting that James Taylor wrote it about as far from North Carolina as he had ever been. In 1968 he was a young, largely unknown singer who had come to London hoping to make a record. Through his friend Danny Kortchmar, he met producer Peter Asher, who had just joined the Beatles’ brand-new label, Apple Records. James Taylor became Apple’s first signing from outside Britain, and he began writing this song in Asher’s flat on Marylebone High Street.

He didn’t finish it there. Taylor took a holiday to the Mediterranean island of Formentera, kept working on the song, and completed it while stranded on nearby Ibiza with Karin, a Swedish girl he had just met. She is the Karin in the lyrics. Years later in concert, he would tell audiences that he had known her only briefly and never saw her again, and he joked about ways he might track her down. But his heart was really back home: he was missing his family, his dog, and the red soil and quiet hills around Chapel Hill, where he had grown up and where his father taught at the University of North Carolina.

The recording sessions had a remarkable cast. Taylor recorded at Trident Studios in London, where the Beatles were working on their White Album at the same time. Paul McCartney played bass on the track, and George Harrison quietly added backing vocals without credit. When Taylor sings about a “holy host of others standing around” him, he means the Beatles themselves. Yet the very next line admits he was still “on the dark side of the moon.” Behind the scenes, Taylor had fallen back into drug addiction during those London months, and the song’s longing for home carries some of that ache.

That struggle also hurt the song’s chances. The album came out in December 1968, and the single followed early in 1969, but Taylor was hospitalized and couldn’t promote it. The single failed to chart in Britain and stalled at No. 118 in the United States. After Sweet Baby James and “Fire and Rain” made him a star, Apple reissued the single in 1970, and this time it climbed to No. 67. Other singers noticed the song before the public did. North Carolina’s own George Hamilton IV took it into the country Top 30 in 1969, and Melanie and John Denver both recorded it in 1970.

The version most of us know came later. Because of licensing trouble with Apple, Taylor re-recorded the song in Los Angeles in 1976 for his Greatest Hits album. This time he sang it at a slower, more wistful pace, with fiddle and pedal steel guitar. That album went on to sell more than 11 million copies in the United States, carrying the song into homes everywhere.

It was never a big hit, but it has outlasted many songs that were. It is often called North Carolina’s unofficial state anthem, and graduating students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill sing it at every commencement. Taylor has performed it on nearly every tour of his career. He once said that audiences respond so warmly to it that he plays it almost every time he performs and has never grown tired of it.