February 9, 2012. Copyright 2012, Graphic News. All rights reserved

Singer songwriter Carole King, author of the best-selling album Tapestry, turns 70
By Susan Shepherd

LONDON, February 9, Graphic News: Last summer, hundreds of people filed out of singer Amy Winehouse's funeral in North London to the sound of a hit song from 40 years earlier. The track was Carole King's poignant ballad, So Far Away, said to be Winehouse's favourite. The troubled star had covered another of King's standards, Will You Love Me Tomorrow?, joining some 50 artists -- from Dusty Springfield to Neil Diamond, Brian Ferry to The Bee Gees -- who have recorded that song alone, since its original release by The Shirelles in 1960. It illustrates perfectly the role King has played, first with her co-writer husband Gerry Goffin and then in further collaborations and on her own, composing for others, both before and after her outstanding 1971 solo album, Tapestry, which broke new ground for a female artist and set records few women have matched.
 
Growing up in Brooklyn, in a Jewish family, Carol Klein took piano lessons and, in high school, formed her own band. Among her early influences was the duo behind many of Elvis Presley's successes, Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller. At Queens College, New York, she dated Neil Sedaka, who had his first Number One with the song he wrote about her, Oh! Carol. Paul Simon was a fellow student, as was Goffin, whom she married in August, 1959. Their career centred on the Brill Building, the famous musicians' headquarters in Manhattan where the hits were churned out in basement studios, as King recalls: "Every day we squeezed into our respective cubby holes with just enough room for a piano, a bench, and maybe a chair for the lyricist if you were lucky. You'd sit there and write and you could hear someone in the next cubby hole composing a song exactly like yours. The pressure...was really terrific." Bobby Vee recorded an early King-Goffin compostion, Take Good Care of My Baby (1961), while Little Eva also topped the charts the following year with The Loco-Motion, revived in the 1980s by Kylie Minogue. One of The Drifters' best-known hits, Up On the Roof is another of the couple's creations, as is The Monkees' Pleasant Valley Sunday.
 
Although they continued to write together throughout the 1970s, King's marriage to Goffin broke down and she moved out to California in 1968, taking their two daughters, Louise and Sherry, with her. It was here that she met Joni Mitchell, songwriter Toni Stern - the two women would later pen King's hugely successful single, It's Too Late - and James Taylor, who encouraged her to write and perform her own material, though she was shy and suffered from stage fright. A 1970 album, Writer, gave a clue as to what was to come a year later when King, now married to bass player Charles Larkey, released the album that would enter the U.S. Billboard charts, stay at the top for 15 consecutive weeks -- a record unsurpassed for a female artist -- and still be there, in the top 200, six years later, having sold 25 million copies worldwide. The cover picture, of a barefoot King on a window seat in her Laurel Canyon living room with her tabby cat, Telemachus, sums up the easy, unsophisticated nature of Tapestry, with its composer's own version of the song Taylor had already championed, You've got a Friend and the one she wrote for Aretha Franklin, Natural Woman, a title King has recycled for her autobiography, due to be published in April 2012. She has a son, Levi, and another daughter, Molly, from her six-year marriage to Larkey. King now lives in Idaho and campaigns on environmental issues.
/ENDS