The Shirelles, an all-black girl group out of New Jersey, had just cracked the Top 40 in September 1960 and needed a follow-up hit. Don Kirshner, impresario of a songwriting factory in Manhattan's Brill Building, gave his teams the assignment. Within 24 hours, the husband-wife combo of composer Carole King and lyricist Gerry Goffin came up with "Will You Love Me Tomorrow."

Almost as impressively, King then "pulled another all-nighter, guided by a how-to library book, to write fifteen charts for guitar, bass, drums, strings, and percussion" for the song, writes Jane Eisner in Carole King: She Made the Earth Move . The resulting 45 rpm single skyrocketed to No. 1. King was all of 18 years old.

King, channeling teenaged romantic angst and young-adult ambivalence, was a ubiquitous composer f

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