A child with perfect pitch who wrote 118 Hot 100 songs

Carole King was born Carol Joan Klein in Manhattan in 1942 and grew up in Brooklyn. Her mother taught her basic piano without formal lessons from the age of three, and at four her parents discovered she had absolute pitch, the ability to name a note just by hearing it. Her father liked to show it off to visitors, and she said making him smile was part of the fun. She wanted to learn the songs pouring out of the radio.

School went fast: she began kindergarten at four and was promoted straight to second grade. At James Madison High School in Brooklyn she formed a band, the Co-Sines, changed her name to Carole King and made demo records with her friend Paul Simon for $25 a session. Later, with her first husband Gerry Goffin, she wrote more than two dozen hit songs for other artists in the 1960s, many of which remain standards.

In the 1970s she stepped forward as a performer. Her debut album Writer came in 1970, and Tapestry followed in 1971, topping the US album chart for 15 weeks and staying on the charts for over six years. Songs such as “I Feel The Earth Move”, “It's Too Late” and “So Far Away” belong to that era,.

The numbers are striking. King wrote or co-wrote 118 songs that charted on the Billboard Hot 100 and 61 that reached the UK charts, making her the most successful female songwriter on the UK singles charts from 1962 to 2005. She has released 25 solo albums, sold over 75 million records and received the 2013 Gershwin Prize as its first female recipient. Few careers move so naturally from the back room to the front of the stage.