Ruth Leon recommends… You’ve Got A Friend – James Taylor & Carole King
Ruth Leon recommendsYou’ve Got A Friend – James Taylor & Carole King
This song never goes out of fashion. It’s been the go-to encore in hundreds of cabaret acts throughout the world, sung by hundreds of artists, but here’s the original.
In this restored footage of “James Taylor In Concert,” James performs Carole King’s classic song, “You’ve Got a Friend” on the popular BBC series “In Concert” on November 13, 1971.
James is joined by Carole King on piano, Leland Sklar on bass and Russ Kunkel on percussion. In 1971, Carole released her album “Tapestry” and James released “Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon.”
“You’ve Got a Friend” appeared on both albums and James’s single of the song reached #1 on the Billboard 100 and #4 on the UK Singles Chart. Both albums won Grammy Awards for the song (Best Male Pop Vocal Performance and Song of the Year). Carole has said that she wrote “You’ve Got a Friend” in response to this lyric in James’s song “Fire and Rain”: “I’ve seen lonely times when I could not find a friend”.
Hearing Fire and Rain while a young teenager was nothing less than a stunningly new form of previously unspeakable beauty brought into the world. I was awestruck by the starkly original timbre of James Taylor’s voice matched by the lyrics. Just recently, I recorded a piano improvisation based on Carole King’s Will You Love Me Tomorrow, not yet released, inspired by Laura Nyro’s solo piano and voice rendering. My late teens haircutter, Myron Dunayer, his shop in North Bellmore, NY, was a neighbor of Carole in Brooklyn, relating with love how when she was a little girl they would practice flute together – he may have taught her how to play – and what a burst of infectious joy she was for his family when visiting.
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