Carnegie Hall

Following the release of her chart-topping album Tapestry in January 1971, Carole King made her headlining Carnegie Hall debut just five months later on June 18. Still at the beginning of her career as a performer in her own right—up until 1970 she had primarily written hits for other artists, most famously “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” for The Shirelles—King made a breathless ascent to a solo show that, for most artists, would be a long-awaited career highlight. Luckily, the performance was preserved, although 25 years elapsed between the concert and the live recording’s eventual release in 1996.

Performing songs drawn mainly from Tapestry, King began the concert with the powerful “I Feel the Earth Move” before transitioning to some of her gentler but still soulful songs. She also brought out a special guest: The year before, King had accompanied James Taylor for his Carnegie Hall concert; the roles were reversed when Taylor made a surprise appearance that night. The moment he appears on stage is captured in the audience’s reaction to the beginning of “You’ve Got a Friend,” a song written by King that Taylor recorded and brought to number one on the charts. The pair also performed a medley of “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,” “Some Kind of Wonderful,” and “Up On the Roof,” the latter of which Taylor recorded with King on her debut album, Writer.

King and Taylor had formed a friendship at the Troubadour nightclub in West Hollywood, where the singer-songwriter community was beginning to take hold over the ’70s music scene. In the 2011 documentary Troubadours: Carole King / James Taylor & The Rise of the Singer-Songwriter, King says of this community and its influence on the culture, “When we sprang out of the box there was just all this generational turbulence, cultural turbulence, and there was a hunger for the intimacy, the personal thing that we did.”

The personal and emotional nature of King’s songwriting spoke to the cultural shift that was finally making room for more art by women, realized in their own voices. King and her kindred spirits—like Joni Mitchell, Roberta Flack, and Carly Simon—wrote songs that reflected women’s feelings of love, anger, betrayal, and triumph, in a way that hadn’t been heard on such a scale or received with such popularity and acclaim—King made history when she became the first woman artist to win all three major categories at the 1971 Grammy Awards. It was only fitting that she end her Carnegie Hall debut with “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.”