Free Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation by Sheila Weller

the lyrics were poor.” Barbara Grossman visited Carole. “I was a college cheerleader, still living with my parents. Carole had quit college, was married with a baby, paying her own rent, and writing songs at night with Gerry after he came home from work. It seemed unbelievable, the distance between my life and her life.” Late 1950s rock ’n’ roll was themed on working-class melodrama: stanched dreams, grueling work, two kids against the world—the existence that Carole was living.
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    In 1959 a new “Earth Angel” had risen to the top of the pop charts. If you were a suburban girl of thirteen or fourteen and heard the Drifters’ “There Goes My Baby,” you stopped in your tracks, drew a breath, and realized: “This is a song I could go ‘all the way’ to.” The urgent ballad with its booming doo-wop intro and its sexual narrator, desperately wailing
    â€œThere goes my baaa-by / Movin’ o-on down the line…”
    was enveloped in a classical string section. The lead singer—who lost his girl because he “made her cry” and is now beside himself wanting her back—had a phlegmy-from-wailing-so-hard voice; his dropped verb endings (“There go’ my baby”; “I want to know if she love’ me”) suggested some intriguing neighborhood that little white girl radio listeners didn’t know; and his every utterance was bathed in Carnegie Hall–like strings, giving his anger and pain a haunting ennoblement. Virginal middle-class girls imagined sex in big-R romantic terms—like Shakespeare, like the Brontë sisters—and here it was, in this bodice-ripping ballad by this Othello.
    His name was Benjamin Earl Nelson (soon to be self-renamed Ben E. King: like Carole, he’d added a “King” to his name), and he’d only gotten the lead singing job because the intended lead, Charlie Thomas, froze up in the studio. The writing and production were done by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who had spent their youths writing as black as they desperately wanted to be (their first R&B hit, in 1951, was Charles Brown’s “Hard Times,” which was later recorded by David “Fathead” Newman for Ray Charles and was more authentically bluesy than two teenage white boys could ever be expected to be); who had been recently adapting for Elvis their songs, like “Hound Dog,” that had originally been recorded by black blues singers; and who had been for the last few years burnishing the safely unsensual and humorous side of the doo-wop tradition to a commercial high gloss with their series of snarky hits for the Coasters, like “Yakety Yak,” “Charlie Brown,” and “Poison Ivy”—all following the bold “Searchin’.” Now the pair had taken the Drifters, a fallen-on-hard-times pet group of Ertegun’s and Wexler’s (Ertegun had proudly discovered the original Drifters lead singer, Clyde McPhatter, whom he and Wexler considered one of the best R&B singers ever), who had a new, default lead singer (Nelson)—and brazenly reversed course. They worked up an operatic strings arrangement on a slow-dance lament (“What can I do? What can I-I do-o-oo?”). Wexler was so angry when Mike and Jerry played him the violin-filled arrangement, he wanted to hurl the tape recorder at the wall. But Wexler was not a fourteen-year-old suburban girl. Carole and Gerry got it immediately: the new Drifters sound was West Side Story.
    By now, black a cappella–based popular music had finally gained some female voices. In 1957 four schoolgirls at St. Anthony of Padua High School in the Bronx—girls who’d harmonized together on Gregorian chants in chapel for years and improvised secular music in the gym and the halls—named themselves the Chantels (after their basketball rival school, St. Francis de Chantelle) and recorded