There are many songs from the past that I really like but I usually identify them with the performer and not the songwriter. Hence the name Gerry Goffin meant nothing to me until I read last week that he had died and they listed some of the songs he had written and they are really great.
Here is an article about six of his best songs. Two of them are among my favorites. One is Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow by The Shirelles.
The other is Up on the Roof by The Drifters.
I’m going to have to go listen to a Carole King album in his memory.
The songs he wrote with Carole King came fifty years ago, so this news is more inevitability than surprise. It’s also no surprise that those songs are still great and worth listening to (and will remain so), while today’s “hits” will be forgotten in ten years.
I’ve noticed that many of his obituary stories describe him as “Carole King’s (ex)husband”, not as her cosongwriter. Quite often, women are listed as someone’s husband instead of being described by their own achievements.
Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow was a groundbreaking song for its time, with lyrics far more serious than its rather jaunty arrangement. Carole King later recorded it in a slower tempo that gave it the gravitas it deserved.
Up On the Roof is another masterpiece. I particularly love a cover version by Laura Nyro on her “Christmas and the Beads of Sweat” album. It was unusual for Nyro (a fine songwriter in her own right) to cover other artists’ songs, so she saw this one as special too.
Great as they are, these two barely scratch the surface of the Goffin/King songbook. We truly have lost one of the masters of pop music..