Carole King Klein was born on Carol Joan Klein; February 9,1942 and 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.
62 Facts About Carole King
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Widely regarded as a highly significant and influential musician, 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.
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Carole King wrote 61 hits that charted in the UK, making her the most successful female songwriter on the UK singles charts between 1962 and 2005.
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Carole King has continued writing for other artists since then.
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Carole 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.
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Carole King has won four Grammy Awards and was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
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Carole King has been inducted twice into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as a performer and songwriter.
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Carole King is the recipient of the 2013 Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, the first woman to be so honored.
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Carole King's parents met in an elevator in 1936 at Brooklyn College, where her father was a chemistry major and her mother was an English and drama major.
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Carole King's mother dropped out of college to run the household; her father quit college and briefly took a job as a radio announcer.
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Carole King's mother had learned to play piano as a child, and after buying a piano, would sometimes practice.
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When Carole King developed an insatiable curiosity about music from the time she was about three, her mother began teaching her basic piano skills, without giving her actual lessons.
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When Carole King was four, her parents discovered she had absolute pitch, which enabled her to name a note correctly just by hearing it.
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Carole King's mother began giving her real music lessons when she was four with Carole King climbing the stool, made higher still by a phone book.
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Carole King began kindergarten when she was four, and after her first year she was promoted directly to second grade, showing an exceptional facility with words and numbers.
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Carole King formed a band called the Co-Sines, changed her name from Carol Klein to Carole King, and made demo records with her friend Paul Simon for $25 a session.
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Carole King attended Queens College, where she met Gerry Goffin, who was to become her songwriting partner.
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When she was 17, they married in a Jewish ceremony on Long Island in August 1959 after Carole King became pregnant with her first daughter, Louise.
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Carole King recorded a few follow-up singles in the wake of "September", but none of them sold much, and her already sporadic recording career was entirely abandoned by 1966.
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Cleveland's WMMS played it every few weeks from 1981 to 1985, and the long-out-of-print LP became sought after by fans of Carole King who liked the edgy sound of the music.
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Carole King made her first solo album, Writer, in 1970 for Lou Adler's Ode label, with Taylor playing acoustic guitar and providing backing vocals.
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Carole King followed Writer in 1971 with Tapestry, which featured new compositions as well as reinterpretations of "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" and " A Natural Woman".
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The album garnered four Grammy Awards including Album of the Year; Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female; Record of the Year ; and Song of the Year, with Carole King becoming the first woman to win the award.
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Carole King: Music was released in December 1971, certified gold on December 9,1971.
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Carole King: Music stayed on the Billboard pop album charts for 44 weeks and was eventually certified platinum.
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In 1973, Carole King performed a free concert in New York City's Central Park with 100,000 attending.
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In September 1974, Carole King released her album Wrap Around Joy, which was certified gold on October 16,1974, and entered the top ten at 7 on October 19,1974.
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In 1975, Carole King scored songs for the animated TV production of Maurice Sendak's Really Rosie, released as an album by the same name, with lyrics by Sendak.
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In 1977, Carole King collaborated with another songwriter, Rick Evers, on Simple Things, the first release with a new label distributed by Capitol Records.
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Carole King moved to Atlantic Records for One to One, and Speeding Time in 1983, which was a reunion with Tapestry-era producer Lou Adler.
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Carole King made a cameo appearance in the film as Tillie, a town hall employee.
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In 2000, Carole King was asked to record a version of her hit song "Where You Lead" as the theme song for the show Gilmore Girls.
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Carole King rewrote a few lyrics to fit the mother-daughter story.
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Carole King rarely performed the song after its original release due to the rise in the Women's liberation movement and falling out of favor of the sentiment behind the lyrics.
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In 2001, Carole King appeared in a television ad for the Gap with her daughter.
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Carole King performed a new song, "Love Makes the World", which became a title track for her studio album in autumn 2001 on her own label, Rockingale, distributed by Koch Records.
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Also in 2001, Carole King composed a song for All About Chemistry album by Semisonic, with the band's frontman Dan Wilson.
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Carole King launched her Living Room Tour in July 2004 at the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago.
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In November 2007, King toured Japan with Mary J Blige and Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas.
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Japanese record labels Sony and Victor reissued most of Carole King's albums, including the works from the late 1970s previously unavailable on compact disc.
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Carole King played piano and Taylor guitar on each other's songs, and they sang together some of the numbers they were both associated with.
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The first, released in April 2010, The Essential Carole King, was a compilation album of King's work and artists covering her songs.
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Carole King campaigned for Idahoan Nicole LeFavour and Barack Obama in 2012.
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Early in December 2012, Carole King received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
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Carole King has been one of the most influential songwriters of our time.
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In May 2013 Carole King received an Honorary Doctorate of Music from Berklee College of Music.
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Carole King was honored as MusiCares Person of the Year in January 2014.
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In 2016, Carole King was the headline performer at the British Summer Time Festival held in Hyde Park, London on July 3,2016, playing all of Tapestry live for the first time.
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In October 2018, Carole King released a new version of her song, "One".
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Carole King later made three appearances as guest star on the TV series Gilmore Girls as Sophie, the owner of the Stars Hollow music store.
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Carole King reprised the role in the 2016 Gilmore girls Netflix revival, Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life.
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Carole King appeared as Mrs Johnstone as a replacement in the original Broadway production of Blood Brothers.
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Carole King has been married four times, to Gerry Goffin, Charles Larkey, Rick Evers, and Rick Sorenson.
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Carole King's children are musicians Louise Goffin and Sherry Goffin Kondor, artist Molly Larkey and Levi Larkey.
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Carole King has testified on Capitol Hill three times on behalf of NREPA: in 1994,2007 and again in 2009.
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Carole King is politically active in the United States Democratic Party.
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Carole King continued her support of Kerry throughout the general election.
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In 2008, Carole King appeared on the March 18 episode of The Colbert Report, touching on her politics again.
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Carole King said she was supporting Hillary Clinton, and said the choice had nothing to do with gender.
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Carole King said she would have no issues if Barack Obama won the election.
61.
The album includes "Sometime in the Morning", a Carole King-penned song originally recorded by the Monkees in 1967.
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Many other cover versions of Carole King's work have appeared over the years.