"Fire and Rain"

James Taylor

On my 13th birthday my parents bought me a Hohner guitar, and boy was it hard to play, a real finger-slicer. They’d gotten the idea that I wouldn’t stay with an instrument, because when I was eight years old, I’d been assigned to play the clarinet in school, and I gave it up. Well, try though I did, I just couldn’t blow the thing! But the guitar? That was different, and I was older and a little bigger, and I was determined. I got a book of chords diagrams, and began to play. Every day, I played, and after awhile, that clunky Hohner began to make some music. I am sure my parents felt bad about their initial hesitancy, because the following, Christmas Santa left me a very nice Yamaha guitar under the Christmas tree. And they found me a teacher, from whom I learned the rudiments of playing the instrument. I took lessons for a year, and I continued to play on my own. But my interest lay in folk music and singing, and after that year I gave up the lessons and started to learn by listening and by imitation. And one of my best “teachers” was the writer of today’s Sometimes a Song, James Taylor. I had just started high school when our song, “Fire and Rain,” shot to the top of the charts, giving JT his first top-ten hit, which would soon be followed by “You’ve Got a Friend,” written not by James Taylor himself, but by his friend, the excellent and by then seasoned songwriter, Carole King, who was a pretty good singer and performer in her own right.

But it was that finger-picking style of Taylor’s, along with his unusual and expressive voice, that set James Taylor apart from the singer-songwriters of his time and attracted me to his music, in particular. How he invented that sound and what gave him the voice and the heart that he brought to his music is something I just learned about in the past two days. I knew his music, but not his back-story. There’s not room here for a complete bio here, but I can share a little more about these couple of things in particular.

First, James Taylor came from a high-intensity family. He was born at Massachusetts General Hospital, where his father was chief resident. His mother, before marriage, had studied operatic singing at the New England Conservatory of Music. When his father finished his residency, he accepted a position on the faculty of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine where he later became the school’s dean. James great up in Chapel Hill, and so his later song “Carolina in My Mind” was a real love song to his childhood home, not just something he made up to sound clever or “country.” As a child, James studied cello (who knows? this might have provided him his “saxophone moment”), but he soon took up the guitar; he was heavily influenced by hymnody and folk and popular music, and the guitar is a better instrument than a cello for a singer-songwriter. However, the cello did influence his picking style. The cello is a bass-clef instrument. Taylor says that his guitar style grew out of his using his thumb to play the cello notes (bass clef), while his fingers played the treble. I honestly don’t believe I’ve heard a picking style just like his by anyone else, and Taylor’s explanation of his method explains why.

For high school, James Taylor’s parents sent him to a prep school at Milton Academy in Massachusetts, where he felt overwhelmed and had difficulty keeping up with social and academic pressures. He returned to Chapel Hill for one of his high school years, then went back to Milton Academy in Massachusetts. But during his senior year he had a nervous collapse, and finished high school in the residential institution where he had gone for help. The mental health issue affected his siblings, as well. It does seem that their father Isaac Taylor’s career as a Naval officer and doctor kept him away from the family frequently when the children were growing up. James Taylor’s younger brother, Livingston, and his sister also suffered mental health problems and likewise finished their high schooling at the same institution. There, James was treated with a form of methadone, which was prescribed for a condition which we would now likely call bipolar disorder; but that medication may have contributed to his developing a serious addiction to hard drugs later on. Who can know for sure? The drug culture was rampant in the music industry in the 1970’s and following, and that business itself is nothing but high pressure.

However you regard his personal struggles in his youth, James Taylor had a sensitive personality, and his empathy for others and his own sadness was a significant feature of his earliest music. And that brings me to the first question I set out to answer before I put fingers to keyboard on this Sometimes a Song. If we are discussing “Fire and Rain,” have any James Taylor fans among you ever wondered about the “Suzanne” mentioned in the song? I would have been truly disappointed to learn that James had chosen that name only to make a rhyme with the word “plans.” But no, there was a Suzanne, a young lady James Taylor befriended at the mental hospital and who later committed suicide during the time he was in England working with Apple. I learned nothing more about Suzanne, except that family and friends kept the sad news of her death from James so as not to disturb him when his career was just taking off. As it turned out, Taylor worked on “Fire and Rain” over a period of years, and so eventually Suzanne’s death made it into the lyrics. These bits of biography go to show that “Fire and Rain” was indeed a personal reminiscence, as was “Carolina in My Mind,” and likely, “You’ve Got a Friend” and a host of other plaintiff and moving James Taylor songs. That’s where the music met the audiences, who responded to the wistful melodies and the evocative lyrics as people often to folk songs, because those songs resonate with true human experiences.

One last thing I will say about James Taylor: not only did his music have staying power, but despite his troubles, so did James himself. The only singers from the era I can think of who kept developing their careers over a lifetime — this is not the same as continuing to perform and attract fans to the OLD music; many have done that — are Paul McCartney, and Paul Simon. It’s also interesting note that James Taylor was the first American singer to record for Apple Records, where he put down some of his best tracks. And Taylor went on to collaborate not only with Paul McCartney and George Harrison, but with a list of others longer than your arm. Taylor is a trooper, but he’s also continued to create new music and to earn awards for that new music, in a remarkably consistent way. He had two albums reach the top of the Billboard Top 200 after the turn of the century, Before This World (which hit number one album in 2015) and American Standard (which hit number one album in 2020 and won James Taylor his 7th Grammy, for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album). As an album “American Standard” brought James Taylor full circle to the great popular music explosion of the 20th century. But it is a good name for Taylor, too: an American Standard, indeed.

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