submissions
| James Taylor – The Water Is Wide Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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This song, while great as performed by James Taylor, was not written by James Taylor. It's an old Scottish traditional. Many people have performed this song, its lyrics evolving over time. |
submissions
| James Taylor – Oh, Susannah Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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Danny's last name is spelled "Kortchmar". Nicknamed "Kootch". And the song was written by Stephen Foster - the first songwriter in the US to make a living off of his compositions. He wrote this song in 1849. He, of course, died in a great amount of debt thanks to the dubious financing practices of his publishing company. He also wrote "Swannee River," "Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair," "Camptown Races," "My Old Kentucky Home" and others. Ironically, he was a northerner, and only crossed the Mason-Dixon line once, when he and his wife went to New Orleans for their honeymoon. |
submissions
| James Taylor – Fire And Rain Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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It's so funny that the legends of this song still persist. Timothy White's excellent James Taylor biography "Long Ago and Far Away" and Joel Risberg's "The James Taylor Encyclopedia" both make it pretty clear what the song is about. Both quote James from a few interviews where he's explained the songs. The interviews are a few decades old, so it's funny that the legends still persist. I guess that's the effect of a truly powerful song - people will let it mean what they want. Anyway, from James' own mouth: "I knew Suzanne ['Susie' Schnerr] well in New York, and we used to hang out together and we used to get high together; I think she came from Long Island. She was a kid, like all of us." The two mental institutions James stayed in were in Massachusetts, so they did not meet there. They met while James was in Greenwich Village. Susie was a friend of Flying Machine drummer Joel "Bishop" O'Brien. James goes on: "But she committed suicide sometime later while I was over in London. At the time I was living with Margaret ["Maggie" Corey], and Richard [Corey] was around a lot and so was Joel O'Brien. All three of them were really close to Susie Schnerr. But Richard and Joel and Margaret were excited for me having this record deal [with Apple Records] and making this album, and when Susie killed herself they decided not to tell me about it until later because they didn't want to shake me up... I didn't find out until some six months after it happened. That's why the 'They let me know you were gone' line came up. And I always felt rather bad about the line, 'The plans they made put an end to you,' because 'they' only meant 'ye gods', or basically 'The Fates'. I never knew her folks but I always wondered whether her folks would hear that and wonder whether it was about them." So, he wrote that first verse while in London within a week and a half after O'Brien finally told him one late night. He then tried to kick heroin while in London, flew back to the States to continue his rehab in Manhattan, and began writing the second verse. His mother then took him to Austen Riggs, a psychiatric clinic in Massachusetts, where he wrote the third verse about the break-up of his New York band of 1966, The Flying Machine. From long-time friend and musical partner, Danny "Kootch" Kortchmar: "...Every word in ["Fire & Rain"] was just James telling the blow-by-blow truth about how he felt. Even the line when he sings that he wrote down this song, and he 'just can't remember who to send it to' had to do with the fact he'd signed a contract with a new publishing company, Blackwood Music, and he didn't know who he was supposed to send his stuff to!" James told Rolling Stone Magazine in 1971: "The first verse was a reaction to a friend of mine killing herself. The second verse of it is about my kicking junk just before I left England. And the third verse is about my going into a hospital in Western Massachusetts. It's just a hard-time song, a blues without having the blues form." |
submissions
| James Taylor – Carolina In My Mind Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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James has said that this is probably his favorite song he's written. In the newly-released "James Taylor Encyclopedia" by Joel Risberg (you can order it at http://www.james-taylor.com), James is quoted as explaining the song's origins like this: "I was recording that Apple album [his self-titled debut album] and I took a break and went to an island off the coast of Spain called Formentera. And I met a girl there named Karin, and she and I took a boat to the next island, which was Abeetha - a larger island. We were just walking around there and missed the last boat back and didn't have any money for a room and we stayed in the street that night and waited for next morning when the boat would run again... She was asleep... and I was up and... I was thinking about my home in North Carolina and what it meant and stuff and that just sort of came down out of the air." |
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