Carole King

Carole King was born Carol Joan Klein in Manhattan in 1942, and long before most people knew her face they knew her songs. With Gerry Goffin, her first husband and writing partner, she turned out more than two dozen hits for other singers in the Brill Building years, many of them standards now. All told, she has written or co-written 118 songs that reached the Hot 100.

Then she stepped out from the wings and sat down at the piano herself. Writer came out in 1970, and Tapestry followed in 1971: warm, unfussy, sounding as if she is playing in your living room, with "It's Too Late" and "I Feel the Earth Move" sharing space with "So Far Away", "You've Got a Friend", "Beautiful" and the title track. It sat on top of the US album chart for 15 weeks and hung around the charts for more than 6 years, and it remains the most successful of her 25 solo albums.

The honors piled up in the decades after: 4 Grammys, the Songwriters Hall of Fame, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice (once as a performer, once as a songwriter), the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize in 2013 as its first female recipient, and the Kennedy Center Honors in 2015.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.