A Natural Woman
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| Carole King, born Carol Joan Klein February 9, 1942, in Manhattan. Her mother, Eugenia (née Cammer), was a teacher and her father, Sidney N. Klein, was a firefighter. She grew up in Brooklyn, learned the piano at age four, and appeared on The Horn and Hardart Children's Hour with a school friend, performing If I Knew You Were Comin' I'd've Baked a Cake" when she was eight. While at James Madison High School in the 1950s, Carol Klein changed her name to Carole King, formed a band called the Co-Sines, and made demo records with her friend Jerry Landis AKA Paul Simon for $25 a session. Carole attended Queens College, where she met Gerry Goffin, who was to become her song-writing partner. At 17, they married in August 1959 after Carole had become pregnant with her first daughter, Louise. They left college and took daytime jobs, Goffin working as an assistant chemist and King as a secretary, while writing songs together in the evening at an office belonging to Don Kirshner's Aldon Music at 1650 Broadway opposite the Brill Building. After writing The Shirelles' Hot 100 #1 hit Will You Love Me Tomorrow, the first No.1 hit by a black girl group, Goffin and King gave up the daytime jobs to concentrate on writing. King and Goffin, with Carole writing the music and Jerry the lyrics, were the songwriting team behind Don Kirshner's Dimension Records, which produced songs including Chains (later covered by the Beatles), The Loco-Motion for their babysitter Little Eva, and It Might as Well Rain Until September which Carole recorded herself in 1962—her first hit. Other hit songs of the sixties include Half Way To Paradise (Tony Orlando, covered by Billy Fury in U.K.), Take Good Care of My Baby (Bobby Vee), Up on the Roof (Drifters), I'm into Something Good ( Earl-Jean and later covered by Herman's Hermits), Pleasant Valley Sunday (Monkees), and (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman for Aretha Franklin. |
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| By 1968, Carole and Jerry were divorced and were starting to lose contact. Carole moved to Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles with her two daughters and reactivated her recording career by forming The City, a music trio consisting of Charles Larkey, her future husband, on bass; Danny Kortchmar on guitar and vocals; and Carole King on piano and vocals. The City produced one album, Now That Everything's Been Said in 1968, but Carole's reluctance to perform live meant sales were slow. After a change of distributors meant that the album was quickly deleted, the group disbanded in 1969. While in Laurel Canyon, King met James Taylor and Joni Mitchell as well as Toni Stern, with whom she would collaborate on songs. Carole made her first solo album, Writer, in 1970 for Lou Adler's Ode label, with Taylor playing acoustic guitar and providing backing vocals. It peaked at number 84 in the Billboard Top 200. Featured here are Goin' Back, I Can't Hear You no More and a reinterpretation of Up On the Roof. Tapestry, the second album by Carole King, was released 10 February, 1971 on Ode Records and produced by Lou Adler. It is one of the best-selling albums of all time, with over 25 million copies sold worldwide. In the United States, it has been certified diamond by the RIAA with more than 10 million copies sold. It received four Grammy Awards in 1972, including Album of the Year. The lead single from the album It's Too Late/I Feel the Earth Move spent five weeks at number one on both the Billboard Hot 100 and Easy Listening charts. In 2003, Tapestry was ranked number 36 on Rolling Stone list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. |
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| Carole King wrote or co-wrote all of the songs on Tapestry, several of which had already been hits for other artists such as Aretha Franklin's (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman and The Shirelles' Will You Love Me Tomorrow (in 1960). Three songs were co-written with King's ex-husband Gerry Goffin. James Taylor, who encouraged King to sing her own songs and who also played on Tapestry, would later have a number one hit with You've Got a Friend. Two songs were co-written with Toni Stern, It's Too Late and Where You Lead. The album was recorded in an overlap with James Taylor's Mud Slide Slim on which Carole King, Danny Kortchmar, and Joni Mitchell appeared as they did on Tapestry, with both albums including You've Got a Friend, which was a number 1 hit for Taylor; King said in a 1972 interview that she didn't write it with James or anybody really specifically in mind. But when James heard it he really liked it and wanted to record it. The iconic cover photograph was taken by A&M staff photographer Jim McCrary at King's Laurel Canyon home. It shows her sitting in a window frame, holding a tapestry she hand-stitched herself, with her cat Telemachus at her feet. Carole King's exposed feet, over the years, has been identified with the fetish culture. |
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| Tapestry, along with being selected Album of the Year, also received Grammys for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, Record of the Year It's Too Late, and Song of the Year You've Got a Friend, making King the first solo female artist to win the Grammy Award for Record of the Year, and the first woman to win the Grammy Award for Song of the Year. In late 2012, the Library of Congress announced that Carole King had been named the 2013 recipient of the prestigious Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, the first woman to receive the distinction given to songwriters for a body of work. Carole King has been one of the most influential songwriters of our time, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said in a statement accompanying the announcement. For more than five decades, she has written for and been recorded by many different types of artists for a wide range of audiences, communicating with beauty and dignity the universal human emotions of love, joy, pain and loss. Her body of work reflects the spirit of the Gershwin Prize with its originality, longevity and diversity of appeal. President and Mrs. Barack Obama hosted the award concert at the White House on May 22, 2013, with the President presenting the prize and reading the citation. |
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Wanderin' Spirit
December, 2015
"A Natural Woman"
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A Holiday Carole
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