The 1980 song James Taylor co-wrote with his five year-old daughter
It might seem like the sweetest and most innocent thing in the world, but as John Lennon had already learned, turning your kid’s silly school project into a pop song wasn’t always a safe play. Who’d have thunk that a tune inspired by a child’s drawing of a magical lady named Lucy flying up in the sky, with diamonds, could be misconstrued as an LSD anthem?!
Despite the established risks of this sort of collaboration, however, another celebrated singer-songwriter decided to try and co-write a tune with his kid a little over a decade later, and in this case, of James Taylor’s ‘Jellyman Kelly’, far less controversy ensued.
The genesis of this tuba-powered little ditty, according to Taylor family lore, is that James was sitting in his living room with his guitar one day in 1979, when his five-year-old daughter Sally walked in and showed him a poem she’d written in kindergarten. It was all about a funny, happy character named Jellyman Kelly and his pal Jenny Mulhenny.
“Here’s a story about Jelly Man Kelly / He loves jelly the most / Ah but most of all Jelly Man Kelly / Loves jelly on toast / Here’s the part about Jenny Mahenny / She’s the fireman’s daughter / Ah but most of all Jenny Mahenny / Loves to boil hot water.”
Papa James, who was once known as a “sweet baby” himself, was understandably impressed and delighted by little Sally’s imaginative poem and offered to help her turn it into a song. So, coming up with a simple acoustic guitar line and an eventual boom-pa tuba part, he put his daughter’s words into musical form, adding a sing-along chorus about Jenny Mulhenny having Jellyman Kelly over for a visit.
“So Jenny put the kettle on / Jelly Man Kelly can he come home? / Jenny can he come? / So Jenny put the kettle on / Jelly Man Kelly can he come home?”
It’s a wonderful story of a dad and daughter bonding over music and creativity, and it provided a nice backstory for the song when Taylor performed it for the first time on a special 1980 episode of Sesame Street, joined by Howard Johnson on the tuba and a choir of kid singers on the chorus.
Now… if you’re a person with a slightly more cynical mind, you might be saying to yourself, “Hmmm, that’s quite an advanced bit of conceptual poetry and character creation for a five-year-old.” Maybe so. You might also find it slightly suspicious that James Taylor, before debuting ‘Jellyman Kelly’, had already been recruited by his sister-in-law, Lucy Simon, to contribute to an all-star album of new children’s songs for a planned Sesame Street album called In Harmony. Taylor and his wife Carly Simon signed on to participate, along with the likes of Bette Midler, Linda Ronstadt, Al Jarreau, the Doobie Brothers, James’s sister Kate Taylor, and of course, life partners Ernie and Bert.
Is it possible that little Sally Taylor, being the daughter of two of the great songwriters of the 1970s, happened to inherit her parents’ talents at a very young age, crafting the tale of ‘Jellyman Kelly’ just in time for her dad to record it for this pre-planned kids record? Sure, why not? But as far as I can tell, the grown-up Sally Taylor, who became a professional recording artist with three albums to her credit, has never publicly confirmed that the Jelly fellow was truly her own childhood creation.
Maybe it’s better to just believe the cute myth, anyway, especially when you consider the broader context of what was going on in James Taylor’s life at the time he recorded, and eventually won a Grammy, for ‘Jellyman Kelly’.
When the song was released on the In Harmony: A Sesame Street Record compilation in October of 1980, Taylor and Carly Simon were still legally married, but their marriage was very much on the rocks, with Taylor openly going through several affairs and eventually buying his own private apartment in New York City, separate from his wife and children, including little Sally (whose birthname was Sarah Maria Taylor).
Taylor’s albums were still selling well, but the critical response to his 1979 record Flag had been mostly negative, and at the age of 32, there was some thought in the industry that he’d lost his spark and was getting a tad predictable and bland.
What a lot of people didn’t realise was that Taylor had been struggling with a heroin addiction for more than a decade, virtually the entirety of his career, and that his numerous attempts to kick the habit had yet to deliver any lasting success. It was a major factor in the gradual collapse of his relationship with Carly Simon, along with his failure to be there as a consistent support during a health scare experienced by their son Ben, who underwent emergency surgery for a malformed kidney in 1979.
Taylor started hanging out with a new, less-than-ideal social group, too, including Saturday Night Live cast member John Belushi, who got him into drinking away his troubles when the smack wasn’t working.
One night in early December, 1980, after a social outing, Taylor was walking through the West 72nd Street subway station in Manhattan when he was accosted by a crazed man in glasses. “He pinned me to the wall,” Taylor later recalled, “Glistening with maniacal sweat, and tried to talk in some freak speech about what he was gonna do, and how he was gonna get in touch with John Lennon.” Taylor got away from the man and didn’t realise until the next day, after Lennon was assassinated, that it had been Mark David Chapman.
“It was surreal to have contact with the guy 24 hours before he shot John,” he added.
All in all, James Taylor would later tell Rolling Stone that the period from 1980 to 1981 had been “the worst in my life. I see myself, basically, as a depressed person who tends to hole up and shut systems down. And a lot of things have been happening at once.”
Arguably, the only good thing from this era, oddly enough, was ‘Jellyman Kelly’, and it wasn’t for nought. By 1983, inspired by wanting to be a better father and role model to his kids, Taylor finally got clean for good.
