CARLY SIMON, MAKE HISTORY WITH 'LET THE RIVER RUN'

Carly Simon

Today, The Grandma has been resting at home reading and listening to one of her favourite singers, Carly Simon, the American songwriter who was born on a day like today in 1945.

The Grandma thinks that the best way to homage Carly Simon is talking about her life and her career. She has been the author of some of the best songs of the American music and today is a great day to remember them.

Carly Simon is the first artist to win all three major awards (Oscar, Golden Globe and Grammy) for a song that is composed and written, as well as performed, entirely by a single artist. She did it with Let the River Run.

Carly Elisabeth Simon (born June 25, 1945) is an American singer-songwriter, musician, and children's author. She first rose to fame in the 1970s with a string of hit records; her 13 Top 40 U.S. hits include Anticipation, You Belong To Me, Coming Around Again, and her four Gold certified singles Jesse, Mockingbird, You're So Vain, and Nobody Does It Better from the 1977 James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me.

After a brief stint with her sister Lucy Simon as duo group the Simon Sisters, she found great success as a solo artist with her 1971 self-titled debut album Carly Simon, which won her the Grammy Award for Best New Artist, and spawned her first Top 10 single, That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be.

Her second album, Anticipation, followed later that year and became an even greater success, earning Simon another Grammy nomination and later being certified Gold by the RIAA.

More information: Carly Simon Official Webpage

She achieved international fame the following year with the release of her third album, No Secrets, which sat firmly at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 for five weeks, was certified Platinum, and spawned the worldwide hit You're So Vain, for which she received three Grammy nominations, including Record of the Year and Song of the Year.

With her 1988 hit Let the River Run, from the film Working Girl, she became the first artist to win a Grammy Award, an Academy Award, and a Golden Globe Award for a song composed and written, as well as performed, entirely by a single artist.

Over the course of her career, Simon has amassed 24 Billboard Hot 100 charting singles, 28 Billboard Adult Contemporary charting singles, and won 2 Grammy Awards, from 14 nominations. AllMusic called her one of the quintessential singer-songwriters of the '70s.

Carly Simon, 1971

She has a contralto vocal range, and has cited Odetta as a significant influence. She was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1994.

In 1995 and 1998, respectively, she received the Boston Music Awards Lifetime Achievement and a Berklee College of Music Honorary Doctor of Music Degree.

She was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame for You're So Vain in 2004 and awarded the ASCAP Founders Award in 2012.

Simon was born June 25, 1945, in the Bronx borough of New York City. Her father, Richard L. Simon, was the co-founder of Simon & Schuster and a classical pianist who often played Frédéric Chopin and Ludwig van Beethoven at home. Her mother was Andrea Heinemann Simon, a civil rights activist and singer. Her father was from a German-Jewish family, while her maternal grandfather Friedrich was of German descent; her maternal grandmother, Ofelia Oliete, known as Chibie, was a Catholic originally from Cuba, and was of Pardo heritage, a freed-slave descendant.

Simon's career began with a short-lived music group with her sister Lucy, as the Simon Sisters. They were signed to Kapp Records in 1964, and released two albums for the label that year, beginning with their debut album, Meet The Simon Sisters.

They had a minor hit with the lead single, Winkin', Blinkin' and Nod, a children's poem by Eugene Field that Lucy had put to music. Their second album, Cuddlebug, quickly followed. The duo made one more album together, 1969's The Simon Sisters Sing the Lobster Quadrille and Other Songs for Children, before Lucy left to get married and start a family.

More information: Facebook-Carly Simon

Later, Simon collaborated with eclectic New York rockers Elephant's Memory for about six months. She also appeared in the 1971 Miloš Forman film Taking Off, playing an auditioning singer, and sang Long Term physical Effects, which was included in the 1971 soundtrack for the film.

Simon was signed by Jac Holzman to Elektra Records in 1970. She released her self-titled debut album, Carly Simon, in March 1971. The album contained her breakthrough top-ten hit That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be, which peaked at No. 10 on the Billboard charts, and earned Simon a nomination for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance at the 14th Annual Grammy Awards. The album itself peaked at No. 30, and Simon won Best New Artist at the same ceremony. Her second album, Anticipation, came in November of that same year.

Simon scored the biggest success of her career in 1972–73, with You're So Vain. It hit No. 1 on the U.S. Pop and Adult Contemporary charts, and sold over a million copies in the United States alone.

Carly Simon, Jane Fonda & Melanie Griffith

It was one of the decade's biggest hits and propelled Simon's breakthrough album No Secrets to No. 1 on the U.S. album charts, where it stayed for five consecutive weeks. 

The album achieved Gold status that year, and by its 25th anniversary in 1997 it had been certified Platinum. You're So Vain received Grammy Award nominations for Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female. Additionally, in 2008, it was listed at No. 72 on the Billboard Hot 100's list of the top 100 songs from the chart's first 50 years, August 1958 through July 2008. On August 23, 2014, the UK Official Charts Company gave it the accolade of ultimate song of the 1970s.

The subject of the You're So Vain song itself became one of the biggest mysteries in popular music, with the famous lyric You're so vain/I bet you think this song is about you. For more than 40 years, Simon has not publicly revealed the name of the subject.

In 1977, Simon had an international hit with the million-selling gold single Nobody Does It Better, the theme to the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me. The song, her second-biggest U.S. hit after You're So Vain, was 1977's biggest Adult Contemporary hit, where it held No. 1 for seven straight weeks.

More information: Twitter-Carly Simon

From 1972 to 1979, Simon sang backup vocals on the following James Taylor songs and albums, not counting compilations: One Man Parade from 1972's One Man Dog, Rock 'n' Roll Is Music Now, Let It All Fall Down, Me and My Guitar, Daddy's Baby and Ain't No Song from 1974's Walking Man, How Sweet It Is from 1975's Gorilla, Shower the People, A Junkie's Lament, Slow Burning Love and Family Man from 1976's In the Pocket, and B.S.U.R. from 1979's Flag. She also co-wrote with Taylor the song Terra Nova on his 1977 album JT.

In 1986, Simon signed with Arista Records and soon rebounded from her career slump. Her first album for Arista, Coming Around Again (1987), gave Simon another international hit with the title track, which was featured in the film Heartburn, returning her to the Billboard Pop Top 20 and the UK Top 10, it also garnered her a Grammy nomination for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.

The Coming Around Again album also featured the Top 10 Adult Contemporary hits Give Me All Night, The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of, All I Want Is You, which featured Roberta Flack on backing vocals, and a cover of As Time Goes By, featuring Stevie Wonder on harmonica.

The album itself was her first Gold release in nine years, and went Platinum in 1988.

In October 2017, Hot Shot Records released a two-disc 30th Anniversary deluxe edition of the album. These and older songs were featured in a picturesque HBO concert special entitled Live from Martha's Vineyard, where Simon and her band performed live on a pier. Most of these songs were compiled for her 1988 album, Greatest Hits Live.

Simon is the first artist to win all three major awards (Oscar, Golden Globe and Grammy) for a song that is composed and written, as well as performed, entirely by a single artist (the only other such artist being Bruce Springsteen for Streets of Philadelphia, from the 1993 film Philadelphia). The Working Girl soundtrack album was released in August 1989, and featured more music from Simon. That same year, Simon released her first children's book, Amy the Dancing Bear.

More information: Instagram-Carly Simon

On May 16, 2000, Simon released the album The Bedroom Tapes, largely written and recorded at home in her bedroom while she was recuperating from her health problems of the previous couple of years.

On March 2, 2010, BBC Radio 2 broadcast An Evening With Carly Simon where Simon performed live for the first time in the UK with her son Ben to a small audience of approximately 100 people. This coincided with the UK release of the Never Been Gone album, which was released for the Mother's Day season and peaked at No. 45, Simon's first studio album to reach the UK Top 100 since 1987's Coming Around Again. Simon also appeared on various UK television shows to promote the album, including The One Show and BBC Breakfast.

On July 27, 2013, in Foxborough, Massachusetts, Simon performed You're So Vain with Taylor Swift on her Red Tour. Swift had previously cited Simon as a musical influence and You're So Vain as one of her favorite songs.

On November 24, 2015, Simon published Boys in the Trees: A Memoir, an autobiographical book focusing on her childhood and her early life, from age five until thirty-five. The two-disc compilation album Songs From The Trees (A Musical Memoir Collection) was simultaneously released along with the book.

More information: Vineyard Gazzette I & II

Sometimes, but the year I lived in France

I started to write songs.

There was a French singer, Francoise Hardy 

-I used to look at her pictures

and try to dress like her.

Carly Simon