James Taylor, “Sweet Baby James”

James Taylor, who turned 66 on March 12, got his signature song out of the way pretty early in his career. Taylor’s second album, 1970’s Sweet Baby James, contained his breakthrough Top 10 single “Fire And Rain”, but it’s the title track that encapsulates the easygoing manner and subtly moving songwriting for which he has become known.

Based on the title of the song, some might assume that Taylor was making a conscious effort to self-mythologize, but he actually wrote this prairie lullaby on a road trip from New Jersey to North Carolina in honor of his brother’s new baby, also named James, whom he was about to meet for the first time. “I was very excited that they had a kid, and very moved that they named it after me, and I was behind the wheel for 20 hours or so, straight, maybe 15 hours, driving straight down,” Taylor remembered in a 2010 interview with Paul Zollo. “And that song just assembled itself as I was driving down there. My memory was good enough in those days that I remembered it all. As soon as I got home, I wrote it down.”

Considering that he was making it all up in traffic, the ingenuity of the lyrical structure is really a marvel. Then again, Taylor does that kind of thing, what he called “Chinese puzzles of rhyming schemes,” as well as anyone. On “Sweet Baby James”, he makes this complexity seem effortless, one line rolling into the next just as mile fades into mile on the protagonist’s never-ending journey.

Taylor uses the cowboy metaphor as a way of evoking both the wonder and loneliness of a life spent on the road away from loved ones. Although it is a life he has chosen, this character still holds out hope for companionship which might not be forthcoming: “He sings out a song which is soft but it’s clear/As if maybe someone could hear.”

As the horizon stretches in front of him (“With ten miles behind me and ten thousand more to go”), even the scenic stretches on the journey, which subtly segues onto the highways of modern cities, don’t provide quite enough solace, even as beautifully as they are described. The last verse speaks of the songs which accompany all travelers, and Taylor’s closing lines wax both folksy and cosmic about these magical tunes: “Maybe you can believe it if helps you to sleep/But singing works just fine for me.”

That leads back to the refrain, the waltz beat and sighing steel guitar calming even the most jangled nerves as Taylor asks, “Won’t you let me go down in my dreams.” That “Sweet Baby James” works as both as a soothing song for a child and a deep meditation on the eternal struggle between the pull of the road and the comforts of home is a testament to its unassuming brilliance. Of course, it comes courtesy of James Taylor, so unassuming brilliance goes without saying.

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