The legendary songwriter behind the first girl group number one
While we often talk about the music world as a male-dominated space, and there is still major progress needed to truly achieve equality in the industry, it was really always women who made the music world go round. Music stands on the shoulders of the teenage girls rocketing bands to fame, the tastemaking women who support new acts, and the women behind the scenes, writing history-shaking songs.
Behind-the-scenes roles in music often get forgotten. The whole point really is for those people to seemingly not exist. They do their work, and it’s passed over to the artist with the hope that audiences will simply connect, allowing that band or singer to be boosted when the music comes across so naturally. The job of a truly great songwriter is to write something that will work seamlessly with an artist, and since the dawn of music, people whose names you might not know have been doing just that.
Some of history’s favourite songs, and some of your favourite tracks, will have been written by these powerhouses working in a studio but often never getting their own moment in the limelight. Some of them simply don’t want that as their dream was to be a songwriter, not a performer. For others, the two roles sit side by side. For one in particular, her hyper-successful career as a writer eventually morphed into her career as an artist herself, meaning that when she finally emerged with her own record, she was already deeply respected.
As one of the most successful and renowned songwriters in history, Carole King is one of those women who power this whole industry. In the ‘60s, especially, she was a mastermind and one of the names who helped truly craft the sound of the era as she wrote songs for a long list of important acts. Even The Beatles looked up to her with John Lennon once stating, “In the early days, Paul and I, we wanted to be the [Gerry] Goffin and [Carole] King of England, you know,”
King played a song in the launch of the band as they covered ‘Chains’ on their debut, a track she and Goffin wrote for the Cookies. But it was another girl group that King would make history with in a powerful moment for women in music.
In 1960, The Shirelles made history when their track ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?’ hit number one, becoming the first song by a girl group to reach the top spot. The song was another King and Goffin composition where, for this track, she wrote the melody while he wrote the lyrics.
It was a historic moment as the girl group stormed the charts with this song and stayed there for 12 weeks. Later, King released her own version on Tapestry as a beautiful way to honour her career as a songwriter that came before her career as a singer and stake her claim on these culture-shaping songs she crafted.
