Sense of Place
"Carolina in My Mind" is strongly associated with its geographical place and has been called an unofficial state anthem of North Carolina. Taylor had grown up in Carrboro, outside Chapel Hill, where his father taught at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. Taylor later reflected: "Chapel Hill, the piedmont, the outlying hills, were tranquil, rural, beautiful, but quiet. Thinking of the red soil, the seasons, the way things smelled down there, I feel as though my experience of coming of age there was more a matter of landscape and climate than people." More broadly, the song has been associated with The South. Author James L. Peacock sees it akin to Stephen Foster's "My Old Kentucky Home" and other songs and works of literature in establishing "the South's sense of place", even if that sense is sometimes an exercise in projected nostalgia. Author Ken Emerson also sees a connection to that quintessential American songwriter, with the Taylor song resembling Foster's "Sitting By My Own Cabin Door" in its sense of longing for home amid personal and contextual dislocation. Recognizing the association with the state, the Chapel Hill Museum opened an ongoing exhibit "Carolina in My Mind: The James Taylor Story" in 2003 that includes memorabilia from Taylor's years in the area and a video documentary.
"Carolina in My Mind" is an unofficial song of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It is played at athletic events and pep rallies, and is sung by the graduating class at every university graduation. In October 2006, Taylor returned to the campus to receive the school's Carolina Performing Arts Lifetime Achievement Award. University chancellor James Moeser said to Taylor, "We love you. We love what you do and how you represent this university." Taylor said, "It's strange but somehow compelling to come home and sing it. It draws a line through my own personal history and connects me again to a place that I go to in my dreams, a landscape that will forever be a part of me." The song is also frequently covered by popular UNC campus a cappella groups, including the Clef Hangers. The Clef Hangers' Fall Concert 2007 performances of the song featured future American Idol season 8 finalist Anoop Desai handling the lead vocal on the closing part of the song. The Clef Hangers, joined by university chancellor Holden Thorp, again performed it in March 2009 at the first anniversary memorial service for murdered student president Eve Carson.
The 82nd Airborne Division of the United States Army, stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, sponsors a group of singing soldiers known as the 82nd Airborne Division All-American Chorus. They recorded a version of the song on their 2009 album A Soldier's Heart.
Some of the song's lyrics are used as an epigraph in the 2001 Celebrate the States series volume on North Carolina and in the 1983 reference book America the Quotable. News providers have used "Carolina in My Mind" as a title for stories about the state's politics, economy, and outdoor activities. The song's geographical association also appears in fiction, including in Carly Alexander's 2004 novel The Eggnog Chronicles and North Carolinian Sharyn McCrumb's 2006 novel St. Dale.
Although it was North Carolina that inspired the song, it is popular in South Carolina too, tying for first place on a South Carolina Information Highway's construction of a soundtrack regarding the state. It has been used as the theme for the television coverage of the annual Family Circle Cup tennis event in South Carolina.
"Carolina in My Mind" is also popular among the Carolinian diaspora; prize-winning North Carolinian writer Jill McCorkle, living in Massachusetts, refers to it as "the chosen anthem of misplaced Carolinians." In Kathy Reichs' initial Temperance Brennan novel, Déjà Dead, the protagonist (like the author) is from North Carolina but working in Montreal as a forensic anthropologist, and alludes to the song as part of a Carolinian reverie in the midst of a horrid murder case. One person who had moved to California said, "Still to this day I get nostalgic whenever I hear it on the radio. It's a song that makes anyone who grew up in North Carolina homesick. In a way, it's become an anthem song for people who left the state."
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