A walking music legend, Carole King’s roots in New York run deep. Born and raised in Brooklyn, a graduate of Queens College, and lifetime lover of the Manhattan music scene as both an artist and an audience member, New York is an integral part of King’s work and identity at large.
Born Carol Joan Klein to Russian and Polish immigrant parents, Carole arrived in the world not too soon after her mother and father had arrived in Brooklyn via Ellis Island. With her father, a radio announcer turned New York City firefighter, and mother, a secretary at a local high school, Carole’s life has been positively steeped in musicality from day one – as well as a deeply ingrained identity as a New York native and lifelong Brooklyn Dodgers fan since youth.
Famously meeting while in an elevator at Brooklyn College, Carole’s father set the precedent for a Klein behind the microphone with his gig as a radio announcer, and her mother’s studies in and passion for english and drama lent themselves to a rather creative upbringing.
Upon her parents’ separation, Carole sought attention and found the answer in the theater. First being introduced to the glittering world of Broadway at just five years old, Carole fell utterly in love, absorbing all of the media and musical projects her mother put on. Her home was rarely quiet, being constantly introduced to shades of music varying from show tunes to Brahms.
Finding a unique outlet for emotions of all ranges, King leaned into the theatrics of the stage as she grew up, eventually auditioning for the High School of Performing Arts – now referred to as the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of the same name. While the audition was not a success, it marked a turning point for Carole as the arts became something of possible professional pursuit more concretely in her mind.
As any teenager of the mid 1950s did, Carole often tuned in to her favorite radio stations. However, unlike many other of her rather sheltered white peers, Carole’s station of preference was Alan Freed’s nightly WINS program. Freed was a lover of artists like the Penguins, the Moonglows, the Clovers, Danny Overbea, La Vern Baker, and BB King – a notably African-American lineup that had many white parents positively beside themselves.
In addition, many tracks played on Freed’s station fell under the umbrellas of rock and roll and R&B, both equally scandalous for their promiscuity and narratives on adversity that were up until then rather absent in the public eye’s musical circuit. This scandal was all the better for an adolescent King, however, who found the new wave of music and its consequent conscious style of creation absolutely mesmerizing
Carole has never been one to shy away from advocating for her beliefs. After moving to Idaho in 1977, she became deeply entrenched in the local ecosystem’s wellbeing and has been an outspoken voice for environmental change ever since.
King would go on to participate in her local Women’s March in 2017, holding a sign that read “One Small Voice.” A single titled with the same phrase would be released the next month, utilizing a thinly-veiled emperor’s new clothes metaphor that encourages listeners to “speak out in honesty.”
While many artists’ relationships with New York City begin on the stage, King’s began in the audience. As a young adult who positively adored the cutting-edge music she was hearing over the radio, being able to attend Freed’s Easter Jubilee at the Brooklyn Paramount in 1955 meant the absolute world and sparked a major bout of motivation.
“Moving farther in, we saw Mickey Baker talking to a couple of the Penguins. At that moment I knew I wanted to mean something to these people. I didn’t want to be one of them. I just wanted them to know who I was and consider me worthy of respect. That ambition existed concurrently and in no way conflicted with my ambition to be an actress.”
– Carole King, A Natural Woman
Auditioning for the High School of Performing Arts once more re-inspired, King enrolled in the fall of 1955 and spent a year studying drama and dance alongside fellow students Al Pacino and Rafael Campos. She would depart the school after a year and return to her classmates at James Madison High School, but Carole would take with her the lessons taught by teachers like Mr. Sachs who inadvertently set her up to arrange vocals through his assignments.
Like many teenagers of the area, King perpetually sought out the liberal arts for peer acceptance and self-expression, the heart of an increasingly viable, ever-vibrant scene only a few subway stops away. 1957 marked a time of escapades up and down Bleecker Street and throughout the coffee shops and venues of Greenwich Village with her peers.
After a rare successful infiltration of the Vanguard, Carole King witnessed mind-blowing jazz sets and sat listening to the music while her peers smoked. By default she became the one picking out the records, and that quickly became much more interesting to Carole than the smoking.
After a nudge in the direction of her high school’s annual Sing by her mother, King wrote, arranged, and performed a piece for the first time to a large audience, and the response of her peers in the audience shifted something within her. She soon began to compose in earnest, arranging pieces for the chorus class before turning the passion into a full-on street corner harmony gig. Recruiting three other peers to be the soprano, tenor, and bass to her alto, the group dubbed themselves the Cosines and performed for free at school events and dances.
This would mark the beginning of a career in arranging both for a group and for herself, developing a process she would keep well into her career as she wrote for or in collaboration with the likes of Bobby Vee, The Everly Brothers, The Monkees, Aretha Franklin, James Taylor, Mariah Carey, and countless others across the industry.
After deciding to pursue songwriting in earnest, Carole chased down a so-called “Atlantic Records” that Freed had mentioned on his radio station, quickly presenting her work to an executive and landing her first recording contract.
Graduating high school at just sixteen years old, King entered Queens College with little enthusiasm after an unexpected move to Rosedale had uprooted her plans to attend her parents’ alma mater. Just around the corner, however, were fellow freshmen and musical peers Art Garfunkel and Paul Simon, the latter becoming a quick friend and collaborator.
Also at Queens College was Carole King’s future songwriting partner and husband of many years Gerry Goffin. While she first thought they’d never see eye to eye on music – he was very open with his hatred for Rock and Roll – his pitch to collaborate on a song quickly became history. Married at her parents’ home in Rosedale in 1959, Carole and Gerry moved into a one-bedroom apartment on Bedford Avenue, only a block away from her childhood home.
Gerry, a chemist in downtown Brooklyn, and Carole, a secretary for a chimney manufacturer in Manhattan, were determined to see their passion for songwriting through and, upon an interaction with Neil Sedaka on the sidewalk of Broadway, the two landed a three-year writing deal that brought the couple out of debt and into a two-bedroom apartment on Brown Street in Brooklyn, an area that had been nothing but corn fields when King was a child.
Working in the highly competitive cubicle space that was Aldon, Gerry and Carole managed their first major hit with “Will You Love Me Tomorrow.” Gerry stepped away from his traditional job and the couple moved into the suburbs of West Orange, New Jersey to raise their second daughter, which is where they would reside together for a number of years before the marriage began to crumble.
When Goffin decided to move to California on his own, King was torn between the vibrancy of what she dubbed “the coolest place she knew” and California, where their children would be able to see their father. Ultimately putting her children before herself, Carole switched Coasts.
1970 marked a second beginning for King, who would be brought back to New York and into the spotlight by friend and collaborator James Taylor during his tour. Just prior to their show at Carole’s alma mater Queens College, Taylor requested she sing the lead for “Up on the Roof” to King’s immediate horror and dismay. Terrified about stepping out of the comfortable zone that was just “James’ pianist,” Carole took a breath and performed, receiving raucous applause.
“Up on the Roof” would return in 1971 at King’s first ever performance as a solo act in front of an audience during the now famed June evening at Carnegie Hall. Recorded and later immortalized in a seventeen-track album, the concert featured some of Carole’s first works alongside duets with Taylor for “Up on the Roof”, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?”, and “You’ve Got a Friend.”
With the turn of the new year came Carole’s 30th birthday, a whopping four GRAMMY wins for her work in Tapestry, and the arrival of her fourth child. The following year, King returned to New York City to deliver a first-of-its-kind Central Park show completely free to the public, a rather poetic homecoming of an estimated 100,000+ attendees.
Recorded and released first as a live album and then a fully-fledged concert documentary in 2023, the Central Park concert remains a sparkling snapshot of King’s commercial and critical peak . Though this level of fame did not come without its drawbacks, with Carole detailing a frenzied crowd of fans crowding her limo after the show in her memoir.
Such situations and the general all-encompassing business that had become her life drew King to the quieter lifestyle of Idaho, though the draw of New York’s creative vibrancy never quite lost her. She would travel back to the city frequently to visit family, friends, and other artists she enjoyed working alongside.
An extended return to New York wouldn’t come into Carole King’s life until she was cast in Hindi Brooks’ A Minor Incident at the West Bank Café Theater in 1987. Performing alongside Paull Hipp who she had met when he was producing the off-Broadway Rockabilly Road, Carole frequently tagged along to Brooks’ recurring gig at the Red Lion Café on Bleecker.
Quietly playing guitar for his sets, she noted that very few would recognize her in their preoccupation with chatting, dining, or drinking, but there were always a few who would glance back and forth at her, nudging their friends with knowing smiles.
It wouldn’t be until Carole attended Bruce Springsteen’s 1988 Tunnel of Love show at Madison Square Garden that the creative spark would return in full, and her sense of dejection at missing the on-stage magic quickly became determination as she brushed up her latest tracks, re-signed with Capitol Records, and recorded City Streets at Skyline Studios.
Among the tracks developed in this era is “Friday’s Tie-Die Nightmare” that tells the tale of a dream Carole had experienced related to the City’s subway system, at which point in her memoir she takes a moment to impart some subway wisdom: “Subway Lesson 1: when the subway runs smoothly, as it does most of the time, it’s the most efficient and affordable method of getting around New York City, and Subway Lesson 2: the only way to catch an express is to leave early enough to make the entire trip on a local.”
Reminiscing about people-watching and considering her own observations of others, King explains that her third subway lesson is not a sentence – it’s a song. Written upon her realization that the way she perceived the people around her was ultimately a reflection of how she was feeling at the moment, subway lesson three comes in the form of the track “Beautiful” – “You’re gonna find, yes you will, that you’re beautiful as you feel.”
Alongside her return to performance came roles as a teacher in the ABC After-School Special It’s only Rock & Roll shot in Pine Bush, New York and Willy Russell’s Broadway production of Blood Brothers on a ten-month run.
While not the star in the most literal sense, Broadway returned to King’s life in 2013 with the previews and eventual debut of Beautiful: The Carole King Musical on January 12, 2014. Exploring her early life and rise to stardom alongside Goffin, the show became the 27th longest running show in Broadway history upon its closure in October of 2019 with a stunning 60 previews and 2,418 shows logged.
Despite not playing herself as the titular role, Carole made a handful of appearances at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre during the show’s run first to surprise lead actress Melissa Benoist in a reprise of “I Feel the Earth Move,” and then to celebrate the production’s fifth anniversary, making appearances during “Beautiful” and the show’s finale.
Beautiful: The Carole King Musical gained endless critical acclaim and won several awards, including two Tonys and a Grammy. A testament to New York’s love for Carole King as a story, an artist, and a human being, the musical immortalizes above all the timeless nature of her work, both honoring and reviving King’s most famous works for a new generation of lifelong fans.
An artist, an advocate, a deft songwriter, a mother, and above all an admirable woman who has pursued nothing less than fulfillment throughout her entire life, King’s legacy is a shining one felt throughout each and every nook and cranny of New York.
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