How being Jewish shaped the career of a Seventies music superstar

When Carole King played her first London show for 27 years, in Hyde Park, in 2016, it might have served as a test for the city’s improved flood defences, such was the volume of tears shed by both performer and crowd. Including your reviewer, who – succumbing four songs in, at Home Again – held out longer than most. Such is the power her music holds, the deep connection it maintains to so many lives.

Extraordinarily, perhaps uniquely, the former Carol Klein achieved this in two very different musical modes. Nobody so exactly represents the evolution of mainstream American pop from 1960s teen bubblegum to 1970s singer-songwriter introspection, because nobody else ever stood at the pinnacle of both. First she triumphed as the composer (with equally inspired lyrics by her then husband, Gerry Goffin) of superb Tin Pan Alley pop songs, whose depth of feeling belied their snobbishly belittled supposed production-line origins, and which spoke with perfect clarity to a teenage audience scarcely younger than their prodigious originator. Then, as the creator of Tapestry, the definitive album of the singer-songwriter era – mature, rounded, reflective, multifaceted, while asking the same key, simple question as a decade before: “Will you still love me tomorrow?”

Jane Eisner’s critical biography, part of the Yale series of books called Jewish Lives, pays close attention to how King’s origins shaped her life and work. It offers fascinating background detail on the way a small cohort of largely secular second and third-generation New York Jews became a vital engine of American popular culture in the era just after rock’n’roll – much as a preceding generation, including Irving Berlin and the Gershwin brothers, disproportionately dominated the songbook of their own age.

Eisner outlines a rare set of propitious circumstances: a steep decline in American antisemitism after the Second World War, an unprecedented Jewish sense of not feeling like a precarious minority in one’s home city, excellent public education, a communal will to seize opportunities for self-improvement and self-advancement. All of this combined to place King in the sweet spot, allowing her to make the most of her talent and dedication. Her struggles were more against the prejudices directed at her sex than at her race.