Carole King

Who is Carole King?

Carole King is a Grammy Award-winning American singer and songwriter.

Her career began in the 1960s when King, along with her then husband Gerry Goffin, wrote more than two dozen chart hits for numerous artists, many of which have become standards, and she has continued writing for other artists since then. Her 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.

In 2000, Joel Whitburn, a Billboard Magazine pop music researcher, named her the most successful female songwriter of 1955–99 because she wrote or co-wrote 118 pop hits on the Billboard Hot 100. In 2005 music historian Stuart Devoy found her the most successful female songwriter on the UK singles charts 1952–2005.

King has made 25 solo albums, the most successful being Tapestry, which held the record for most weeks at #1 by a female artist for more than 20 years until broken by Whitney Houston. Her most recent non-compilation album was Live at the Troubadour in 2010, a collaboration with James Taylor that reached number 4 on the charts in its first week and has sold over 600,000 copies.