James Taylor - Sweet Baby James | Music From My Misspent Youth
I remembering seeing this concert on WNET/Channel 13 out of NYC when I was 11 or 12 years old. I liked this song so much, my big sister let me play her copy of the first James Taylor LP and it soon became one of the first LP’s I ever bought (Greg Allman - Laid back has that honor, though The Monkees - Headquarters had been given to me by my sis). I’ll admit to not liking anything James Taylor has done since. Go figure.
But this song, and this performance. He’s so laid back and feeling it, like he wrote the song yesterday and he just wants so much for you to hear it. And it’s a great sounding, slope shoulder Gibson J-45!!!
For some reason, this song became synonymous for me with being on the road. When I hear it, I think of that state of getting there - not only of not being here nor there, but not even caring about where here and there might be. Maybe it was because I had been down the Mass Pike from Stockbridge to Boston in snow, rain, ice and glorious sunshine a zillion times. Or that there were many nights when I had only a song between me and a meal or a beer or a place to sleep or a warm body or a dozen other things these days I take for granted.
Doesn’t matter. It’s a doozy…
I can see the Key Street Bridge at the end of M Street in Georgetown. It’s an amazing March day, a nice bed sleep and shower after hitchhiking for 10 days around the southeast in 1979. I’m taking large strides, my big Kelty backpack and that old Regal parlor guitar I bought in a pawn shop in Chicago the summer before strapped across my back. I had spent the last 2 days in the back of a large Amerian sedan, barreling across Tennessee and North Carolina, with a stop in Boone, some kids from Kansas driving, all of us drinking beer and doing acid, and now James Taylors’ “Sweet Baby James” was rolling out of my mouth, loud and clear, the water strolling below and I’m laughing (again) as I step back into Virginia and head for the north bound Interstate.