The Essential Carole King

The dual CD set profiles Carole's career as America's best know singer and songwriter, with disc one devoted to her own recordings and disc two highlighting Carole's best-known and most beloved 60's compositions recorded by major pop artists.

From her earliest forays into music at the age of four, it was Carole King's destiny to pursue a career as a composer, musician and vocalist. A decade before the mid-'60s folk boom put the term "singer and songwriter" into American and British pop music vernacular, Carole was, in fact, exactly that � a singer and songwriter. As a fledgling songsmith still in her teens in the late 1950s, her sophisti�cated demo recordings startled music execs who, within five years, would fully appreciate the unerring Top 40 sensibility that Carole's demos possessed.

As THE ESSENTIAL CAROLE KING suggests, there is an aspect of her career for which she has never received the full measure of credit � her role in jump-starting the singer and songwriter movement at the beginning of the 1970s. As Kubernik writes, "There was Sam Cooke, Dylan, Brian Wilson, Lennon & McCartney, Neil Diamond, John Phillips, Smokey Robinson, and others, but no other female artist, up to that point, had so forged the writer, folkie, rock, R&B, singer, songwriter, performer, hitmaker, life style maker as Carole did on Tapestry."

In presenting a new persona for herself at the dawn of the decade, Tapestry unquestionably set the stage for Top 40 radio and television's commercial acceptance of the new popular singer/songwriter stylists. The genre that was set in motion by James Taylor, Carly Simon, Jackson Browne, Cat Stevens, Roberta Flack, Bill Withers, Don McLean and many other singer/songwriters at the start of the 1970s has reverberated through�out the '80s, '90s, and '00s and continues to have an effect on pop music today.