Women's Activism NYC

Carly Simon

1945 - Today

By: Donald Tang | Date Added:
Edited

Carly Elisabeth Simon was born on June 25, 1943, she is an American singer-songwriter, musician, and children's author. She first rose to fame in the 1970s with a string of hit records; her 13 Top 40 U.S. hits include "Anticipation" (No. 13), "You Belong To Me" (No. 6), "Coming Around Again" (No. 18), and her four Gold certified singles "Jesse" (No. 11), "Mockingbird" (No. 5, a duet with James Taylor), "You're So Vain" (No. 1), and "Nobody Does It Better" (No. 2) from the 1977 James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me. After a brief stint with her sister Lucy Simon as duo group the Simon Sisters, she found great success as a solo artist with her 1971 self-titled debut album Carly Simon, which won her the Grammy Award for Best New Artist, and spawned her first Top 10 single, "That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be" (No. 10). Her second album, Anticipation, followed later that year and became an even greater success, earning Simon another Grammy nomination and later being certified Gold by the RIAA. She achieved international fame the following year with the release of her third album, No Secrets, which sat firmly at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 for five weeks, was certified Platinum, and spawned the worldwide hit "You're So Vain", for which she received three Grammy nominations, including Record of the Year and Song of the Year. With her 1988 hit "Let the River Run", from the film Working Girl, she became the first artist to win a Grammy Award, an Academy Award, and a Golden Globe Award for a song composed and written, as well as performed, entirely by a single artist. Over the course of her career, Simon has amassed 24 Billboard Hot 100 charting singles, 28 Billboard Adult Contemporary charting singles, and won 2 Grammy Awards, from 14 nominations. AllMusic called her "one of the quintessential singer-songwriters of the '70s". She has a contralto vocal range, and has cited Odetta as a significant influence. She was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1994. In 1995 and 1998, respectively, she received the Boston Music Awards Lifetime Achievement and a Berklee College of Music Honorary Doctor of Music Degree. She was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame for "You're So Vain" in 2004 and awarded the ASCAP Founders Award in 2012. Her father, Richard L. Simon, was the co-founder of Simon & Schuster and a classical pianist who often played Frédéric Chopin and Ludwig van Beethoven at home. Her mother was Andrea Heinemann Simon, a civil rights activist and singer. Her father was from a German-Jewish family, while her maternal grandfather Friedrich was of German descent; her maternal grandmother, Ofelia Oliete, known as "Chibie", was a Catholic originally from Cuba, and was of Pardo heritage, a freed-slave descendant. Ofelia was raised primarily in England by nuns until the age of sixteen. A 2017 episode of PBS show Finding Your Roots tested Simon's DNA, which included 10% African and 2% Native American, likely via her maternal grandmother. Simon was raised in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx, and has two elder sisters, Joanna and Lucy, and a younger brother, Peter. They were raised as nominal Roman Catholics, according to a book of photography Peter published in the late 1990s. Simon has stated that when she was seven years old, a family friend in his teens sexually assaulted her. She stated, "It was heinous", adding, "It changed my view about sex for a long time." Simon began stuttering severely when she was eight years old. A psychiatrist tried unsuccessfully to cure her stuttering. Instead, Simon turned to singing and songwriting. "I felt so strangulated talking that I did the natural thing, which is to write songs, because I could sing without stammering, as all stammerers can." Simon attended Riverdale Country School and also attended Sarah Lawrence College, before dropping out to pursue music.

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