John Mathew Smith & www.celebrity-photos.com from Laurel Maryland, USA · CC BY-SA 2.0

Before she ever performed her own songs, King and her first husband Gerry Goffin wrote over two dozen hit singles for other artists out of New York's Brill Building, songs that became standards in their own right. She then reinvented herself as a solo performer with Tapestry (1971), an album that spent fifteen weeks atop the U.S. charts and stayed on them for six years. Across a songwriting career spanning decades, she wrote or co-wrote 118 songs that charted on the Billboard Hot 100.