King's past accomplishments have become something of a pop music legend. She and her former husband and lyricist, Gerry Goffin, were one of the three great independent pop song-writing teams of the Sixties, the other two being Burt Bacharach and Hat David, and Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. It is as much to their credit that they not only wrote one of Aretha Franklin's best songs, "Natural Woman," but Steve Lawrence and Edyie Gorme's best, "Go Away Little Girl," as well. They wrote the Animals' best pop record, "Don't Bring Me Down," and Bobby Vee's best seller, "Take Good Care of My Baby." Then there was "Chains" and "Don't Say Nothing Bad About My Baby" for the Cookies, "One Fine Day" for the Chiffons, "The Locomotion" for Little Eva, and "Oh, No, Not My Baby" for Maxine Brown. And, of course, there were some for the groups: They wrote Herman's Hermits best song, "Something Tells Me I'm Into Something Good," two for the Righteous Brothers, "For Once In My Life" and the overlooked and under-rated "Hung On You," and "Goin' Back" and "Wasn't Born to Follow" for the Byrds. She even had a hit for herself about ten years ago called "It Might As Well Rain Until September." On top of them all, there was "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow" for the Shirelles and "Up On the Roof" for the Drifters.
A Gerry Goffin-Carole King song was always engagingly sentimental. It was boy-girl, loneliness-togetherness, "Don't Bring Me Down" versus "Hung On You.' 'My baby's got me locked up in chains" versus "Will you still love me tomorrow" music the very core of the rock & roll lyric sensibility. The music expressed the outlook with a sweetness that ultimately shine through no matter what the context. The chorus of "Hung On You" is simply a beautiful tune. "Chains" has a blues structure but the melody is pretty, pretty pop music. Even "The Locomotion" has an amazingly distinctive melody line for a dance song. (And Little Eva ten years ago sounds so exactly like Carole King today one can only assume that Carole taught it to her note for note and breath for breath.)
The songs of Goffin and King are superb examples of the song writing craft of the Sixties. Finely honed to meet the demands of the clients who commissioned them, and written with the requirements of AM radio always firmly in mind, they still managed to express themselves in a rich and personal way. Like Hollywood directors who learned how to make the limitations of the system work for them by the use of their own imagination, Goffin and King made the limitations of AM music work for them and in the process created something of their own pop vision.
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