This is your chance to win this Yamaha FG800 guitar, signed by legendary singer/songwriter Carole King!
Since writing her first number-one hit, Will You Love Me Tomorrow at the tender age of 17, Carole King has arguably become the most celebrated and iconic singer/songwriter of all time. Carole wrote Will You Love Me Tomorrow for The Shirelles with then-husband Gerry Goffin. The dozens of chart hits Goffin & King wrote during this period have become part of music legend, including Take Good Care Of My Baby (Bobby Vee, 1961), The Loco-Motion (Little Eva, 1962), Up On The Roof (The Drifters, 1962), Chains (The Cookies, 1962; The Beatles, 1963), One Fine Day (The Chiffons, 1963), Hey Girl (Freddie Scott, 1963), I’m Into Something Good (Herman’s Hermits, 1964), Just Once In My Life (with Phil Spector for The Righteous Brothers, 1965), and Don’t Bring Me Down (The Animals, 1966).
In 1960 Carole made her solo debut with a song called Baby Sittin’, two years later, her demo of It Might As Well Rain Until September made the Top 25 in the United States, climbing all the way to No. 3 on the British chart. In 1967 Goffin and King’s Natural Woman was immortalized by Aretha Franklin. To date, more than 400 of her compositions have been recorded by more than 1,000 artists, resulting in 100 hit singles. Carole's 1971 solo album, Tapestry, took her to the pinnacle. While she was recording Tapestry, James Taylor recorded King’s You’ve Got A Friend, taking the song all the way to number one. In a first for a female writer/artist, Tapestry spawned four GRAMMY Awards® — Record, Song, and Album Of The Year as well as Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female honors for Carole. With more than 30 million units sold worldwide, Tapestry remained the best-selling album by a female artist for a quarter century, and Carole went on to amass three other platinum and eight gold albums. Tapestry was inducted into the GRAMMY Hall Of Fame® in 1998. In 1987 Carole was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and, a year later, Goffin and King were awarded the National Academy of Songwriters’ Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1990 the duo was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and in 2002, Carole was honored with the prestigious Johnny Mercer Award from the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
On July 3, 2016, Carole returned to the UK stage for the first time in 27 years to perform Tapestry in full at a sold-out performance at Londone's Hyde Park during the BST Festival. The 65,000+ audience spanned multiple generations and showed the power and timelessness of Carole's music. In 2019, she performed at the national "A Capitol Fourth" concert in Washington D.C. and at the Global Citizen Festival in New York's Central Park and presented the Artist of the Decade Award to Taylor Swift at the American Music Awards. In 2021, Carole was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame a second time, becoming the first person to be inducted separately as a songwriter and a performing artist. In 2021, Carole wrote a new song, Here I Am (Singing My Way Home) with Jennifer Hudson and Jamie Hartman, for Hudson's star turn as Aretha Franklin in the biopic Respect. The film also includes Hudson's bravura performance of the Goffin/King song (You Make Me Feel) Like a Natural Woman, the 1967 hit credited as cementing Franklin's status as a superstar. In addition to her continuously evolving musical career, Carole, who has lived on an Idaho ranch since the early 1980s, is actively involved with environmental organizations in support of wilderness preservation.