Carolina in My Mind

From Wikipedia:

[…] Taylor wrote it while overseas recording for the Beatles’ label Apple Records, and the song’s themes reflect his homesickness at the time. Released as a single, the song earned critical praise but not commercial success. It was re-recorded for Taylor’s 1976 Greatest Hits album in the version that is most familiar to listeners. It has been a staple of Taylor’s concert performances over the decades of his career.

The song was a modest hit on the country charts in 1969 for North Carolinian singer George Hamilton IV, released as the first single from his 1970 album Back Where It’s At (see George Hamilton IV discography). Strongly tied to a sense of geographic place, “Carolina in My Mind” has been called an unofficial state anthem for North Carolina. It is also an unofficial song of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, being played at athletic events and pep rallies and sung by the graduating class at every university commencement. The association of the song with the state is also made in written works of both fiction and non-fiction. It has become one of Taylor’s most critically praised songs and one that has great popularity and significance for his audience.

Song and recordings

The song references Taylor’s years growing up in North Carolina. Taylor wrote it while overseas recording for the Beatles’ label Apple Records. 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 at the time, as he was missing his family, his dog and his state.

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 original recording of the song was done at London’s Trident Studios during the July to October 1968 period, and was produced by Asher. 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. The other players were Freddie Redd on organ, Joel “Bishop” O’Brien on drums, and Mick Wayne providing a second guitar alongside Taylor’s. Taylor and Asher also did backing vocals and Asher added a tambourine. Richard Hewson arranged and conducted a string part; an even more ambitious 30-piece orchestra part was recorded but not used. The song itself 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”. 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 mellow Taylor classic” and a “stone-classic”.

The song was first released on Taylor’s eponymous debut album in December 1968 (February 1969 in the United States), and was later released as a single in the UK in February 1969 and in the United States in March 1969. However, owing to the same problems which plagued the release of the album (namely, Taylor’s inability to promote it due to his hospitalization for drug addiction), the single’s original release reached only No. 118 on US pop charts and failed to chart in the UK. Indeed, Taylor had fallen back into addiction during the London recording sessions, and his line about being surrounded by Beatles had been immediately followed by “Still I’m on the dark side of the moon.” Following the success of Taylor’s second album, Sweet Baby James, and its hit single “Fire and Rain”, “Carolina in My Mind” was reissued by Apple as a single in October 1970 and rose to No. 67 on the U.S. charts. (A previously unreleased acoustic demo of “Carolina in My Mind” was issued as a bonus track on the 2010 Apple Records remastering of James Taylor.) In Canada, the song peaked at No. 64 in the spring of 1969, then recharted in the fall of 1970, reaching No. 39.

Different versions of both this song and “Something in the Way She Moves” were remade by Taylor for use on his 1976 Greatest Hits album because of the difficulty of obtaining licensing rights from Apple during the 1970s and because of uncertainty about where the Apple masters were. The new recordings were done in October 1976 at The Sound Factory in Los Angeles and production was again done by Peter Asher.

This rendition of “Carolina in My Mind” had a slower tempo than the original, and accompanying Taylor on acoustic guitar were experienced LA session musicians Dan Dugmore on pedal steel guitar (highlighted in the descending note sequences at the song’s conclusion), Lee Sklar on bass, Russ Kunkel on drums, Clarence McDonald on piano, Andrew Gold on harmonium, and Byron Berline on fiddle. Backing vocals were handled by Gold and Taylor. Greatest Hits became a diamond record, selling more than 11 million copies in the United States by 2001, and this is the version of “Carolina in My Mind” that became best known. The remake earned even more critical praise than the original. Bill Janovitz of Allmusic said of the 1976 recording that it “accent[ed] the languid, plaintive and wistful country melancholy of the song,” while in the 1979 Rolling Stone Record Guide, critic Stephen Holden said that the “stunning” remake showed how much Taylor’s singing had strengthened in the intervening years. Biographer White believed that the song benefited from the removal of the original’s orchestration. […]