Carole King Biography

Carole King’s vibrant and sentimental album Tapestry (1971) hit number one in the nation, won four Grammys and stayed on the charts for nearly six years.

Carole King was already a songwriting legend: she got her start as a in New York, crafting pop songs in a variety of styles with her first husband, Gerry Goffin. From the late 1950s until the mid-1960s the pair wrote dozens of hit songs for other singers, including “”One Fine Day” (The Chiffons), “Don’t Bring Me Down” (The Animals), “I’m Into Something Good” (Herman’s Hermits), “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” (The Shirelles), and — written for their teen babysitter — “The Loco-Motion” (Little Eva).

Tapestry showed King in her own light and spawned the hits “It’s Too Late,” “So Far Away,” “I Feel the Earth Move” and her version of “You’ve Got a Friend” (a song made even more famous by King’s collaborator James Taylor).

She followed up with hits like 1974’s “Jazzman,” did the music for Maurice Sendak‘s TV show Really Rosie (1975) and had success with her own versions of some of her best-known songs on 1980’s Pearls. Her other albums include Wrap Around Joy (1974), Touch the Sky (1979), City Streets (1989, featuring Eric Clapton) and Love Makes the World (2001).

In the 21st century, Carole King became an active voice for protecting the environment and began performing live again on rare occasions, her spot secure in the history of American pop music. She and Goffin were inducted into the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame in 1990. She was given Kennedy Center Honors in 2015, and the video of Aretha Franklin singing “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman” to King at that event went viral. The Broadway musical Beautiful, based on her life story and featuring her hit songs, opened on January 12, 2014, with Jessie Mueller as King.