Carolina in My Mind

Taylor began it at Peter Asher's flat on Marylebone High Street, worked on it on Formentera and finished it on Ibiza, stranded there with Karin, a Swedish woman he had just met. Newly signed to the Beatles' label and surrounded by his idols, he told Rolling Stone, he found himself missing his home in North Carolina.

The first recording, made at Trident in 1968 for his Apple debut, has Paul McCartney on bass and George Harrison, uncredited, among the backing singers, with strings arranged by Richard Hewson. Jon Landau singled out McCartney's playing. As a single it reached only 118 in the US in 1969 and 67 on its reissue in 1970.

Because Apple was hard to license from and nobody was sure where the masters were, Taylor recut it in October 1976 at The Sound Factory in Los Angeles for Greatest Hits, again with Asher producing. The remake is slower, with Dan Dugmore's pedal steel carrying the falling line of the coda, Andrew Gold on pump organ and Byron Berline on fiddle. Stephen Holden called it stunning.

Live

It is the song he has played most, appearing in virtually every tour's set list: setlist.fm counts nearly a thousand performances, from a London folk club in March 1969 to September 2026. "I play it almost every time I perform, and I haven't tired of it," he told Parade in 2020. Every graduating class at UNC-Chapel Hill sings it, and it is often called North Carolina's unofficial anthem. He teaches it in his free online guitar lessons.

George Hamilton IV took it to number three in Canada in 1969, and it has been recorded by the Everly Brothers, Melanie, John Denver and Kate Rusby among many others. J. Cole sampled it in 2026 to open The Fall-Off. The upload in the hypersongs web is the 1976 re-recording from Greatest Hits, not the 1968 original.