Every Friday around 11 a.m. Central, it’s time for Classic Americana on Radio Heartland. We pull a special track from the archives or from deep in the shelves to spotlight a particular artist or song.

Carole King was born February 9, 1942, and she is one of the most important and celebrated songwriters of our time. King has won four Grammy Awards, was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, has been inducted twice into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a performer and songwriter, is the recipient of the 2013 Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song (the first woman to be so honored), and is also a 2015 Kennedy Center Honoree.

In the course of her career, Carole King has written or co-written 118 songs that have landed on the Billboard Hot 100 and 61 hits that charted in the U.K. She has also made 25 solo albums, the most successful being her second studio album, Tapestry. Released one day after King’s 29th birthday, the album spent 15 weeks at No. 1 in Billboard’s U.S. albums chart, and it has sold more than 25 million copies worldwide.

Tapestry gave us so many songs that are loved to this day: “I Feel the Earth Move,” “So Far Away,” “It’s Too Late,” “You’ve Got a Friend,” and “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” — the last of which Carole King co-wrote with her husband Gerry Goffin in 1967 for Aretha Franklin, and it became a huge hit and signature song for Franklin.

Another track on the album is “Where You Lead.” Carole King introduced this song to the world on Tapestry, and Barbra Streisand recorded a cover of it that became a Top 40 hit for a hot minute in late 1971. But probably the biggest resonance the song has is with fans of the much-loved television series Gilmore Girls. In the year 2000, Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino requested permission from Carole King to use “Where You Lead” as the theme music for the series. King, after understanding the mother-daughter dynamic of the TV show, decided to re-record the song as a duet with her own daughter, Louise Goffin. That duet version is what is heard during the opening titles on Gilmore Girls — a program that continues to enjoy a lot of popularity thanks to streaming. (What’s more, King herself appeared in a number of episodes of Gilmore Girls in the role of the proprietor of a musical instruments shop.)

For our Classic Americana pick this week, we’ll hear the original recording of “Where You Lead” off Carole King’s 1971 album, Tapestry.

External Links

Carole King – official site

Gilmore Girls – Netflix