There’s no question Carole King belongs in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — she’s been there, along with her first husband and lyricist, Gerry Goffin, since 1990. By one standard, she’s the preeminent female songwriter of the second half of the 20th century — she wrote or co-wrote 118 songs that reached the Billboard Hot 100.
This year she was inducted as a performer, and while she had a string of hit albums through the mid-’70s, the tentpole for her performing career was her second LP, “Tapestry,” perhaps the best album to come out of the whole early-’70s singer-songwriter movement and proof that King could write her own lyrics after her 1969 divorce from Goffin. This was one of two previous Goffin-King hits she included on the LP; the backing vocals are by James Taylor and Joni Mitchell.
King and Goffin, who met in college, had their commercial breakthrough with this song, released in late 1960 and one of the top singles of 1961. It was the first No. 1 hit for the Shirelles, whose lead singer Shirley Owens didn’t want to record it because it sounded “too country” to her. The addition of strings won her over. On the first printing the song was titled simply “Tomorrow,” later expanded to its present form, which omits the word “still” for some reason. The song was so popular that when the Shirelles re-released “Dedicated to the One I Love,” which had stalled at No. 83 for them the year before, it went to No. 3.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3irmBv8h4Tw