Apr 30 2012
The King legacy
Practically all of the people who buy and read the new memoir by Carole King, A Natural Woman, will be coming to it from the musical point of view – rightly so, considering her mass success as a songwriter and singer. But Idahoans will be looking for other material, because she has also been a public figure in Idaho, sometimes a controversial one.
The column today by Rocky Barker of the Idaho Statesman highlighted some of that. King, tiring of the urban life in New York, went to the far extreme and moved to backcountry Idaho, most prominently to the Robinson Bar area near Stanley. That this didn’t go over so well in some of those areas says a lot about Idaho: People in the state want growth and immigration (from other states), and they like money. But something in the cultures clashed. In asserting claims and rights that many other Idaho landowners drew, she attracted criticism the likes of which many of them never see.
The Barker review is a good introduction to some of this.
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