A Brief Tribute to A Legendary Musical Artist and Album by Doug Draper
Posted February 24th, 2021 on Niagara At Large
The Tapestry album cover, featuring Carole King at home with that heroic-looking cat in the foreground
It remains, to this day, one of the most beloved and best-selling albums of all time.
When Carole King’s ‘Tapestry’ was released in February of 1971, it originally received “little fanfare,” according to liner notes written for one of many updated editions of it decades later.
It was multiple moments like one I remember weeks or possibly even months after the album’s release where at a house party I attended with friends, someone put the record on a turntable and said; “You’ve got to listen to this.”
That album cover is so embedded into people’s minds, that it was used as another image for working in U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and his mitts at the U.S. Presidential Inauguration this past January – images of Sanders wearing those mitts that went viral on social media
And listen people did, from the first pulsating piano chords to ‘I feel the Earth Move’, to songs like ‘So Far Away’, ‘It’s Too Late, ‘Beautiful’, ‘You’ve Got a Friend’, and on to ‘Smackwater Jack’, and (You Make Fell Like) A Natural Woman, a song Carole King co-wrote with her late husband Gerry Goffin that became a huge hit for the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, in 1967.
Once you put Tapestry on, you could not take it off, and it went on to be the number one best selling album by any female artist in the world for more than 20 years. And it remains on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of best-albums of all time to this day.
Just five years ago, tens of thousands of Carole King fans packed London, England’s Hyde Park to hear her perform the entire album, song by song in sequence, followed by a medley of other great songs she and her late husband co-wrote for other artists – including classics like ‘Up on the Roof’, ‘Chains’, ‘Locomotion’, ‘I’m in to Something Good’ and so many more.
Carole King apparently received countless letters from fans, wanting to know more about the great cat on the Tapestry cover. She once sent this photo of the cat out, as a kitten, on her website. The cat’s name was Telemachus, after a character in Homer’s Odyssey.
So in tribute to this iconic album, still very much available for one generation after another and, I suspect, for at least a few more generations to come, I could not help but give it a nod on its 50th birthday.
I leave you with a Youtube video, featuring one of my favourite Tapestry tracks, although there were so many more to choose from. To listen and watch, click on –
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