James Taylor & Carole King – Youve Got A Friend (BBC In Concert, 11/13/71)

Carole King wrote “You’ve Got a Friend” as an answer to a lonely line in James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” — then gave him the song

Carole King wrote You’ve Got a Friend as a reply. In his 1970 song Fire and Rain, James Taylor had sung a line about lonely times when he couldn’t find a friend — and King, working alongside him in the studio in early 1971, answered it with a song about exactly the kind of friend who shows up when you call. She always said it arrived almost on its own: as close to pure inspiration as she’d ever felt, written through her rather than by her. It became Taylor’s only No. 1 record.

Keep watching: James Taylor – Fire and Rain · James Taylor – Something in the Way She Moves

The two of them were making their albums at the same time in Los Angeles — King her landmark Tapestry, Taylor his third record, Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon. Taylor played guitar on King’s sessions, and when he heard You’ve Got a Friend, he knew immediately what it was. With time to spare in his own studio, he cut a version of it, King sitting in on piano. Then came the awkward part: he’d recorded her song without asking. He didn’t want to take it out from under her, so he called and asked her blessing. King gave it freely — an act of friendship that mirrored the song itself.

Both versions were tracked in the same stretch of weeks with overlapping musicians, including Joni Mitchell on backing vocals. King’s reading, built on piano, opened Tapestry‘s second side; Taylor’s, with the guitar out front, went out as a single. Released in 1971, it climbed all the way to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 that July — the only chart-topper of Taylor’s long career — and reached No. 4 in Britain.

Two friends, two Grammys, one song

The recognition split neatly between them. At the 1972 Grammy Awards, Taylor won Best Male Pop Vocal Performance for his recording, while King took Song of the Year, the award that goes to the writer — one song, two trophies, two friends. The performance on this page captures them together, from the BBC’s In Concert series on November 13, 1971, the writer and the man who made it a hit sharing a single stage. More than fifty years later Taylor still speaks of it in the largest possible terms: in early 2026 he called it, simply, the best song ever written by a human being. Given how it came to be — one friend answering another’s loneliness, then handing the answer back as a gift — it’s hard to argue the point.