Claim: Carole King is a performer.

Carole King -LRB- born Carol Joan Klein , February 9 , 1942 -RRB- is an American composer and singer-songwriter . She is the most successful female songwriter of the latter half of the 20th century , having written or co-written 118 pop hits on the Billboard Hot 100 between 1955 and 1999 . King also wrote 61 hits that charted in the UK , making her the most successful female songwriter on the UK singles charts between 1952 and 2005 .   King 's career began in the 1960s when she , along with her then husband Gerry Goffin , wrote more than two dozen chart hits for numerous artists , many of which have become standards . She has continued writing for other artists since then . King 's success as a performer in her own right did not come until the 1970s , when she sang her own songs , accompanying herself on the piano , in a series of albums and concerts . After experiencing commercial disappointment with her debut album Writer , King scored her breakthrough with the album Tapestry , which topped the U.S. album chart for 15 weeks in 1971 and remained on the charts for more than six years .   King has made 25 solo albums , the most successful being Tapestry , which held the record for most weeks at No. 1 by a female artist for more than 20 years . Her most recent non-compilation album was Live at the Troubadour in 2010 , a collaboration with James Taylor that reached number 4 on the charts in its first week and has sold over 600,000 copies . Her records sales were estimated at more than 75 million copies worldwide .   She has won four Grammy Awards and was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for her songwriting . She is the recipient of the 2013 Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song , the first woman to be so honored . She is also a 2015 Kennedy Center Honoree .