Carole King | Academy Of Achievement

So, in reading your book, you say that your mother exposed you to music while you were still in her womb. Why?

Carole King: My mother loved music and she had an eclectic collection of classical and show tunes and some popular music. So she just loved it and always listened to it, so I was exposed to it in the womb and as a child. I loved music and it made a lot of sense to me the gift that I have for it. I was able to understand it and learn it and recreate it.

You said that her mother actually encouraged her to be in music or theater or play the piano.

Carole King: It was important to my grandmother to have music in the house. My grandmother grew up in Russia and in her little small village, she was — my grandmother was the daughter of a baker and they didn’t have a lot of money. In her village, the girls with a lot of money her age had pianos in their living rooms. And so she dreamed that her daughter would play piano and she exposed my mother to music. And my mother’s real affinity was theater, but she learned enough music to pass on to me.

Could you tell us about your first recording?

Carole King: The first recording I ever made was “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” in a little recording booth in Coney Island. And I just remember it because, you know, I was with my mom and my dad and it was — it was a great experience, except that at the end for some reason I broke down crying. I was three, two or three.

Why did you cry?

Carole King: I don’t know. Because I was two or three probably.

At age four you started learning how to play the piano.   Did you parents tell you that you were gifted?

Carole King: I don’t know if they told me I was gifted, and I don’t know if I knew I was gifted. I just liked it. I had almost perfect pitch.

What about the radio? Did that inspire you?

Carole King: Well, the radio was quite a wonderful thing. This was before television. One of the things I loved about radio is it stirred the imagination because you were only hearing it. You weren’t seeing what someone else thought you should see. And I remember many years later when MTV came along and they started making videos of songs. They really took away our ability to imagine for ourselves what — what the song evoked in each of us.

Were music and the arts something that your whole family valued?

Carole King: My mother always had an affinity for theater, which included music but her love was for — she wrote plays, she acted in them, she directed them. This was — she didn’t make a career out of it because her career at the time was being a homemaker and raising me.