Carole King (born February 9, 1942) is an American singer, songwriter, and musician who has been active since 1958, initially as one of the staff songwriters at 1650 Broadway and later as a solo artist. She is regarded as one of the most significant and influential musicians of all time.
Born Carole Klein on February 9, 1942 in Manhattan and raised in Brooklyn, she began playing piano at the age of four, and formed her first band, the vocal quartet the Co-Sines, while in high school. A devotee of the composing team of Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller (the duo behind numerous hits for Elvis Presley, the Coasters, and Ben E. King), she became a fixture at influential DJ Alan Freed's local rock & roll shows; while attending Queens College, she fell in with budding songwriters Paul Simon and Neil Sedaka as well as Gerry Goffin, with whom she forged a writing partnership.
In 1959, Sedaka scored a hit with "Oh! Carol," written in her honour; King cut an answer record, "Oh! Neil," but it stiffed. She and Goffin, who eventually married, began writing under publishers Don Kirshner and Al Nevins in the famed pop songwriting house the Brill Building, where they worked alongside the likes of Doc Pomus, Mort Shuman, Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, and countless others. In 1961, Goffin and King scored their first hit with the Shirelles' chart-topping "Will You Love Me Tomorrow.” Together, the couple wrote over 100 chart hits in a vast range of styles.
King also continued her attempts to mount a solo career, but scored only one hit, 1962's "It Might as Well Rain Until September." In the mid-'60s she, Goffin, and columnist Al Aronowitz founded their own short-lived label, Tomorrow Records; Charles Larkey, the bassist for the Tomorrow group the Myddle Class, eventually became King's second husband after her marriage to Goffin dissolved. She and Larkey later moved to the West Coast, where in 1968 they founded the City, a trio rounded out by New York musician Danny Kortchmar. The City recorded one LP, Now That Everything's Been Said, but did not tour due to King's stage fright; as a result, the album was a commercial failure.
James Taylor and King became close friends, and he encouraged her to pursue a solo career. Released in 1970, Writer proved a false start, but in 1971 she released Tapestry, which stayed on the charts for nearly six years and was the best-selling album of the era. A quiet, reflective work that proved seminal in the development of the singer/songwriter genre, Tapestry also scored a pair of hit singles, "So Far Away" and the chart-topping "It's Too Late," whose flipside, "I Feel the Earth Move," garnered major airplay as well. Issued in 1971, Music also hit number one, and generated the hit "Sweet Seasons"; 1972's Rhymes & Reasons reached number two on the charts, and 1974's Wrap Around Joy, which featured the hit "Jazzman," hit the number one spot.
In 1975, King and Goffin reunited to write Thoroughbred, which also featured contributions from James Taylor, David Crosby, and Graham Nash. After 1977's Simple Things, she mounted a tour with the backing group Navarro and married her frequent songwriting partner Rick Evers, who died a year later of a heroin overdose. Pearls, a collection of performances of songs written during her partnership with Goffin, was released in 1980 and was her last significant hit, and King soon moved to a tiny mountain village in Idaho, where she became active in the environmental movement.
After 1983's Speeding Time, she took a six-year hiatus from recording before releasing City Streets, which featured guest Eric Clapton. In 2001, she returned with Love Makes the World, a self-released disc on her own Rockingale label. Four years passed before her next record, The Living Room Tour, a double-disc set documenting her intimate 2004/2005 tour that found her revisiting songs from throughout her career with only her piano and acoustic guitars as accompaniment.
King joined long-time friend James Taylor for a co-starring show at L.A.'s famed Troubadour venue in 2007, and the pair followed it with several more shows, resulting in the Live at the Troubadour release in 2010. Her memoir A Natural Woman was published in 2012 and spent time on the New York Times best-seller list. The following year she was awarded The Recording Academy Lifetime Achievement Award, and she became the first woman to be awarded The Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, presented by President Barack Obama at an all-star White House gala.
In 2014, Kings life became the basis for a Broadway musical, Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, which followed her professional and personal life in the '60s and '70s. The show opened on Broadway in January 2014, with a score dominated by King's hit songs, and an original cast album appeared the following May. The next year, King was a Kennedy Center Honouree, and in 2016 she played the entirety of Tapestry at the British Summer Time Festival in Hyde Park. In 2021, King was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist..
In addition to her continuously evolving musical career, Carole, who has lived on an Idaho ranch since the early 1980s, is actively involved with the environmental organizations in support of wilderness preservation.
(Edited from Wikipedia)