Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon

Photo by Janice Kerkkamp

Fifty years ago, Carole King's album Tapestry was recorded and released. Such a good collection of songs, beautifully performed! It received four Grammy Awards in 1972, including Album of the Year; it was a best-selling album and continues to turn up on lists of greatest albums. A recent article commemorating the anniversary of its release mentioned a book which sounded interesting to me: Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon – and the journey of a generation by Sheila Weller (published in 2008). I immediately borrowed a copy of the book from the library.

The book was indeed interesting. The three singer-songwriters were born within a few years of each other, but they came from such different backgrounds: Carole King was born in 1942 to a middle-class family and grew up in Brooklyn; Joni Mitchell, granddaughter of Canadian farmers, was born in 1943 in Fort Macleod, Alberta, and grew up in Saskatchewan; Carly Simon, born in 1945, is the daughter of a wealthy New York book publisher. This alternating biography reads like a novel. At a time when young women were expected to marry in their early 20s, stay at home, look after the children, and defer in many things to their husbands, these women managed to find their own path to stardom, and they did it in different ways.

You can look up their biographical details on the internet; what this book does is to present their stories in such a way as to compare them easily and show the similarities and differences in their struggles to find their own voice, as well as the ways their lives intersected. Journalist Sheila Weller did a lot of research, including interviewing many people who knew these women intimately at various points in their lives.

Of course a book like this spends a lot of time talking about the women's love lives – I guess that's what sells, right? But I appreciated the fact that the author also goes into some detail about the work of King, Mitchell, and Simon: their musical background, their singing and instrumental style, the collaboration with other musicians, the songs they wrote and recorded, the way their music changed over the years.

As a child of the 1960s, I enjoyed reading about the popular culture of this time; as a woman, I appreciated reading the women's perspective.

If you're interested in reading more about Joni Mitchell, I also recommend Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell by David Yaffe (published in 2017).

And now I think I'll go back and listen to Joni Mitchell's albums again.

For young people who aren't familiar with their songs (and for those of us who love them and want to hear them again), here are a few Youtube links:

Carole King: Beautiful, I Feel the Earth Move, It's Too Late, So Far Away, You've Got a Friend

Joni Mitchell: Both Sides, Now (1969 version), Big Yellow Taxi, The Circle Game, Woodstock, Help Me, Free Man in Paris

Carly Simon: That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be, You're So Vain, Anticipation, Haven't Got Time for the Pain

These are some of their biggest hits, but they wrote many other beautiful songs, too.

In case you’re wondering about the connection to RCM Examinations: there are a few songs by Joni Mitchell and Carole King on the Popular Selection List, 2019 Edition, for the piano examinations:

Level 3: Both Sides, Now by Joni Mitchell, in The New Standards: 64 Popular Modern Songs, Easy Piano (Hal Leonard, 2018)

Level 4: Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell, arranged by Tom Geron, in Popular Hits, Level 4, Alfred’s Basic Piano Library (Alfred, 2017)

Level 4: It’s Too Late by Carole King (lyrics by Toni Stern), in First 50 Classic Rock Songs You Should Play on the Piano, Easy Piano (Hal Leonard, 2017)

Level 7: I Feel the Earth Move by Carole King, arranged by Nancy Faber & Randall Faber, in BigTime Piano Rock ‘n’ Roll, Level 4, Intermediate (Faber Piano Adventures, 1999)

Level 8: You’ve Got a Friend by Carole King, in The Best Piano Solos Ever (Hal Leonard, 2017)

And in the Voice Syllabus, 2019 Edition, you’ll find one song by Joni Mitchell:

Level 5, List C (Popular Repertoire): The Circle Game by Joni Mitchell, in Joni Mitchell Anthology (Alfred, 1983)