CAROLE KING KLEIN, YOU'VE GOT A FRIEND IN NEW YORK

Today, The Grandma has visited an old New Yorker friend, Carole King.

 

Meanwhile, The Newtons have been preparing their Cambridge Exam. They have practised some A2 Speaking Practice.

 

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Carole King Klein (born Carol Joan Klein; February 9, 1942) is an American singer, songwriter, and musician who has been active since 1958, initially as one of the staff songwriters at the Brill Building and later as a solo artist.

Regarded as one of the most significant and influential musicians of all time, King is the most successful female songwriter of the latter half of the 20th century in the US, having written or co-written 118 pop hits on the Billboard Hot 100.

King also wrote 61 hits that charted in the UK, making her the most successful female songwriter on the UK singles charts between 1962 and 2005.

King's major success began in the 1960s when she and her first husband, Gerry Goffin, wrote more than two dozen chart hits, many of which have become standards, for numerous artists.

She has continued writing for other artists since then. King's success as a performer in her own right did not come until the 1970s, when she sang her own songs, accompanying herself on the piano, in a series of albums and concerts.

After experiencing commercial disappointment with her debut album Writer, King scored her breakthrough with the album Tapestry, which topped the U.S. album chart for 15 weeks in 1971 and remained on the charts for more than six years.

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King has made 25 solo albums, the most successful being Tapestry, which held the record for most weeks at No. 1 by a female artist for more than 20 years. Her record sales were estimated at more than 75 million copies worldwide.

She has won four Grammy Awards and was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. She has been inducted twice into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as a performer and songwriter. She is the recipient of the 2013 Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, the first woman to be so honoured. She is also a 2015 Kennedy Center Honoree.

King was born Carol Joan Klein on February 9, 1942, in Manhattan, New York City, to Jewish parents Eugenia, a teacher, and Sidney N. Klein, a firefighter.

King attended Queens College, where she met Gerry Goffin, who was to become her songwriting partner. When she was 17, they married in a Jewish ceremony on Long Island in August 1959 after King became pregnant with her first daughter, Louise.

They quit college and took day jobs, Goffin working as an assistant chemist and King as a secretary. They wrote songs together in the evening.

Neil Sedaka, who had dated King when he was still in high school, had a hit in 1959 with Oh! Carol. Goffin took the tune and wrote the playful response, Oh! Neil, which King recorded and released as a single the same year. The B-side contained the Goffin-King song A Very Special Boy. The single was not a success. After writing the Shirelles' Billboard Hot 100 number 1 hit Will You Love Me Tomorrow, the first No.1 hit by a black girl group, Goffin and King gave up their daytime jobs to concentrate on writing. Will You Love Me Tomorrow became a standard.

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My life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue,
an everlasting vision of the ever changing view.

Carole King