Not quite, Dan124. See direct quotes from James Taylor here: "Although James Taylor's song is indeed autobiographical, it doesn't match the heart-wrenching story line of popular legend. By the time "Fire and Rain" established Taylor as an international pop star at the tender age of twenty-two, he'd experienced plenty of psychological and physical pain upon which he could draw in crafting his lyrics. He already had a long history of depression and substance abuse for which he'd been hospitalized several times (his first hospital experience was the basis of one of his earliest songs, 'Knocking 'Round the Zoo'), and he'd spent quite a while recuperating from a near-fatal motorcycle accident which had broken both his hands and feet and prevented him from picking up a guitar for several months. All of this was fodder for his songwriting, as he explained in a 1972 interview with Rolling Stone: '"Fire and Rain" has three verses. The first verse is about my reactions to the death of a friend. The second verse is about my arrival in this country with a monkey on my back, and there Jesus is an expression of my desperation in trying to get through the time when my body was aching and the time was at hand when I had to do it ... And the third verse of that song refers to my recuperation in Austin Riggs which lasted about five months.'
The "Suzanne" mentioned in the lyrics to "Fire and Rain" wasn't Taylor's girlfriend or fiancée, but merely an acquaintance (Suzanne Schnerr) whom he had met while he was a teenager in New York in 1966-67 performing (with friends Danny Kortchmar and Joel O' Brien) as part of a group called The Flying Machine. As quoted in Timothy White's biography of him, Taylor says that "I knew Suzanne well in New York, and we used to hang out together and we used to get high together; I think she came from Long Island. She was a kid, like all of us."
A few years later, after Taylor had decamped to London and was finishing up his debut album for the Beatles' Apple Records label, he found out that Suzanne had committed suicide several months earlier, and his friends had withheld the news from him so as not to let it distract him and derail his career: '[Suzanne] committed suicide sometime later while I was over in London. At the time I was living with Margaret [Corey], and Richard [Corey] was around a lot, and so was Joel O' Brien. All three of them were really close to Susie Schnerr. But Richard and Joel and Margaret were excited for me having this record deal and making this album, and when Susie killed herself they decided not to tell me about it until later because they didn't want to shake me up. I didn't find out until some six months after it happened. That's why the 'They let me know you were gone' line came up. And I always felt rather bad about the line, 'The plans they made put an end to you,' because 'they' only meant 'ye gods,' or basically 'the Fates.' I never knew her folks but I always wondered whether her folks would hear that and wonder whether it was about them.'" -again, from
http://www.snopes.com/music/songs/firerain.asp
