“Sweet Baby James” by James Taylor

"Sweet Baby James" opens James Taylor's 1970 breakthrough album of the same name, and it's a lullaby wearing cowboy boots, which is exactly the cross he was aiming for. He wrote it for his infant nephew, the son of his older brother Alex, who had been named James after him, and dreamed it up while driving through Carolina to meet the baby for the first time.

It rocks gently in waltz time, Taylor's acoustic guitar and unhurried voice out front, Red Rhodes' pedal steel and Chris Darrow's fiddle adding the prairie dust, with Carole King on piano, John London on bass and Russ Kunkel on drums. Peter Asher produced. Taylor sweated over the verses, later calling their rhyme scheme the most intricate he ever wrote, and he rates it his best song. As a single it never charted, and it became one of his best-loved tunes anyway.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.