"I Said, 'How Are You Sue?'"

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When you listen to a song you rarely have any indication as to whether it's based in reality or just a a well-told piece of musical fiction. That's especially true in story songs. The 1975 sinking of the iron ore boat the Edmund Fitzgerald wasn't the first nor the worst maritime disaster in Great Lakes history; however, thanks to Gordon Lightfoot's epic song "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" it is the best-known. In contrast, the events minutely detailed in Elton John's songs "Ticking" and "The Ballad of Danny Bailey" are complete and total figments of lyricist Bernie Taupin's fertile imagination. Harry Chapin was a master at story songs. When I saw him in 1980 he joked about being in an airplane flying through terrible turbulence, "And my life flashed before my eyes. Of course, it was coming out in rhymed couplets." Several of his love songs, such as "Story of a Life," were obviously inspired by his wife. His terrifying "Sniper," although fictitious, seems to be partially inspired by Charles Whitman's 1966 massacre in the clock tower at the University of Texas. Then there's "Taxi," one of Chapin's best-known and most loved songs. The story is about a cab driver named Harry who's looking for his last fare of the night in a driving rainstorm in San Francisco. He picks up a woman at a red light and soon discovers that she was an old girlfriend. "She said, 'How are you, Harry?' I said, 'How are you, Sue?'" It turns out that there was more than a little reality in that song. Clare MacIntyre-Ross was a girlfriend of Harry's during his college years. Chapin had actually applied for a taxi license, but got a job before he could actually work in the profession. According to Chapin's brother Tom (himself a singer/songwriter), Harry was actually worried about what might happen if his former girlfriend ended up hailing a ride from him. When he wrote the song "Taxi" he put her in the song as "Sue." All of this comes to mind because Ms. McIntyre-Ross passed away March 9 after suffering a stroke. She was 72. Chapin died in July 1981 in a fiery crash on the Long Island Freeway. He was only 38. Here's the classic Harry Chapin story song, "Taxi."