Roberta Flack, who won back-to-back Grammys for Record of the Year, dies at 88
Her first big hit – The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face – took off after Clint Eastwood featured it in his directorial debut.
In March 1971, a group of superstar Black musician acts, including Wilson Pickett and Ike & Tina Turner, travelled to Ghana to play a concert celebrating that nation’s independence day. Footage of the trip, preserved in an early version of the documentary “Soul to Soul,” includes the party’s tour of The Cape Coast Castle, a forbidding fortress where enslaved people were warehoused before making the Middle Passage.
The space is laden with history, inhumanity, grief. Walking through it, the pianist Les McCann explains he’s experiencing flashbacks, as though from some collective unconscious. “I can see where a great source of my hopelessness came from,” he says.
Alongside McCann was Roberta Flack, who died Monday at the age of 88, her representatives said in a news release. She was 34 on that visit to Ghana, and among the least famous performers on the trip, still largely undiscovered by the American mainstream. Standing in the dungeon, sombre and stunned, Flack does what comes naturally: She sings — a spiritual called Oh, Freedom. For three minutes, her bare voice fills the cavernous space, reverberating off walls in which, one of the other musicians has noted, the old shackles are still embedded.
It’s a staggering scene, plaintive and raw. “Not a dry eye in the place, ” Jesse Jackson, who was on the trip, recalled in the 2023 PBS documentary “Roberta Flack.” The moment is remarkable for its quietude, for the exquisite clarity of Flack’s voice and the sturdy ferocity within its softness — qualities that will be closely associated with her once she becomes an international star, shortly after that trip.
In the PBS documentary, Flack explained, “I think when you tell the truth you don’t have to necessarily scream it.”
A junkyard piano
Roberta Flack was born on Feb. 10, 1937, in Black Mountain, North Carolina, and moved to Arlington, Virginia, in the Washington, DC, suburbs, as a young child. Sitting on her mother Irene’s lap while Irene played piano and organ at their Methodist church, Flack began to tinker herself, then to properly play, demonstrating a prodigy-grade prowess as a young child that those around her clambered to support.
A Sunday-school teacher paid for Flack to take lessons. Flack’s father, Laron, brought home a ramshackle upright piano from a junkyard, which the family restored and painted green. By age 9, Flack was playing Chopin nocturnes, crying at the keyboard because the music moved her so powerfully. At 13, she accompanied her church’s choir on Handel’s Messiah.
“I was not scared or embarrassed or hesitant at all,” she told a British broadcaster in 2014. “All you had to do was say, ‘Roberta, play.’ And I’d play.”
At the time, America didn’t necessarily expect a Black child to master Verdi or Bach, and wasn’t always open to having its expectations up-ended. Flack would often recall skilfully performing a Scarlatti sonata in a statewide competition as a teenager, only to come in second in the segregated “Negro division”; Scarlatti, she gathered, wasn’t what the judges wanted from someone like her.
Thwarted, she developed an imaginary alter-ego she called Rubina Flake, an unencumbered wunderkind who Flack envisioned performing at Carnegie Hall. And though Flack would actually play Carnegie Hall later in life, at least twice, she seemed subtly disappointed that it had been as a pop singer and not a concert pianist.
“One of the hassles of being a black female musician,” she told Time in 1975, “is that people are always backing you into a corner and telling you to sing soul. I’m a serious artist. I feel a kinship with people like Arthur Rubinstein and Glenn Gould. If I can’t play Bartok when I want to play Bartok, then nothing else matters.” At age 15, Flack went to Howard University on a full scholarship to study music. Though she excelled there, a dean advised her to go into teaching, given the dearth of opportunity for Black women in opera and classical music. In 1959, she took a job at a segregated school in rural North Carolina, then transferred to a school in Washington DC.
Restaurant pews
While she taught, she moonlighted. By 1968 she was leading a trio five nights a week at Mr Henry’s, a restaurant on Capitol Hill. The clientele was eclectic. The atmosphere was electric. The owner built an entirely new room upstairs, outfitted with church pews, to accommodate Flack’s booming crowds.
She performed her own interpretations of pop and soul tunes — some blazing and sparking, some slow and seductive — alongside folk songs and spirituals. As word spread, musicians passing through the District stopped to check her out: Dionne Warwick, Liberace. A New York Times reporter, dispatched to investigate, explained that “(h)er conquest has been so complete that, for months, mention of her name has inevitably raised the question, ‘When’s Roberta going to make it nationally?’ ”
Flack’s debut album appeared in 1969. Titled First Take, it was recorded in only 10 hours. There was so much music built up inside the woman; all she needed was for someone to put a microphone in front of her and press record.
Much of First Take was daring and political. In the PBS documentary, the music scholar Jason King calls its first track, Compared to What, “a cutting, sardonic approach to what it means to live in America in a time of white supremacy,” adding: “To me, it’s a Black Lives Matter record.” Other tracks included Ballad of the Sad Young Men, a tune from a long-forgotten musical that Flack reframed as a melancholic lament for gay men “trying to be brave, running from the truth”; and Tryin’ Times, a soulful protest song that calls out “riots in the ghetto” and “confusion all over the land.” It preceded Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On by two years.
The album didn’t cut through commercially at first. But two years later, in 1971, Flack caught her break. While driving on a Los Angeles freeway, Clint Eastwood heard an overlooked track from First Take on the radio — The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face — and knew immediately he’d found the score for a climactic montage scene in his coming directorial debut, Play Misty for Me. Flack’s rendition of the song, penned by British folk singer Ewan MacColl, was nearly 5 1/2 minutes long — so unhurried and contemplative that it sounded almost prayerful. Flack had insisted on recording it at a shockingly slow tempo — “deathly slow,” she once called it — over the objection of her producer. The result dripped with emotion, with wistfulness.
The movie elevated the song and Flack’s career along with it; within a year of the film’s release, she was one of the biggest acts in music, headlining the Newport in New York Jazz Festival at Yankee Stadium. In 1973, The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face won a Grammy for Record of the Year.
Killing Me Softly
The following year, Flack became the first woman to win that award twice in a row — this time for her other career-defining hit, Killing Me Softly With His Song. Flack had heard the tune, originally recorded by Lori Lieberman as a genteel folk song, on a cross-country flight. By the time she landed, she’d written out a score, tweaking the chords and melody and introducing her version’s iconic, flowing chain of “oh’s” and “la’s” as a bridge. The NPR critic Ann Powers writes that with this one track, Flack “laid the groundwork for the neo-soul sounds of R&B in the 21st century.”
Flack had also released Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway in 1972, an album of duets with her friend. She and Hathaway were recording a follow-up in 1979 when Hathaway either jumped or fell to his death from a Manhattan hotel room, after having dinner at Flack’s apartment. (By then, Flack had left Washington and moved to the famed Dakota building in New York City; her unit was next door to the home of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who became friends.) For many years afterwards, Flack kept a light on in her apartment above where Hathaway had been sitting the evening he died. “I want the spirit of Donny to be comfortable, to be warm and bright,” she told NewsDay in 1988.
Roller coaster of hurt
At the height of her fame in the mid-1970s, however, Flack’s lifestyle was depleting her, making her sick. She spoke to Time about the recurrent roller coaster of performing for 50,000 fans only to wind up “back in a hotel room by yourself in Missouri, your stomach hurts and your humanness just overwhelms you.” She wasn’t married at the time, and would never have children. (In 1965, Flack had married the bassist Steve Novosel, but the marriage ended in 1972.) As her career soared, the prospect of a family seemed impossible to her. Even if musicians who become mothers “can manage cooking dinner and practising,” she explained to Time, “their art suffers. They fail a little in both roles.” Flack took a 15-month hiatus. When she returned in 1975 with Feel Like Makin’ Love, it was the first time she had produced one of her own albums, seizing complete control of her sound. The title track hit No 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and would be covered by the neo-soul singer D’Angelo 25 years later. Flack credited herself as producer in her album’s liner notes as “Rubina Flake”. In retrospect, however, her career seemed to be falling on the wrong side of two widening divides in the culture.
First, Flack was an artful, innovative interpreter of other people’s songs, in the vein of Frank Sinatra, in an era when audiences — and especially critics — were exalting the singer-songwriter model instead, lured in by the likes of Joni Mitchell or Neil Young, who performed their own material, and wrote from a place of deep and numinous idiosyncrasy and confessionalism.
Moreover, the cool, contemplative allure of Flack’s performances was at odds with the rambunctious power of many of her Black contemporaries, like Aretha Franklin or the Jackson 5. In 1971, rock critic Robert Christgau dismissed Flack for her “gratuitous gentility” — a blandness he would compare to Barry Manilow’s in a subsequent review.
King, the music scholar, in an essay about Flack, frames such responses within “a stereotypical racial binary,” in which Black music is expected to be “hot, energetic, body-driven and gritty” while white music is refined and “intellectual.” (Christgau has defended his Flack comments by saying it would have been “more condescending than disrespectful” if he hadn’t been willing to criticise Black music as pointedly as he did white rock.) Flack, for her part, seemed aware that she could only be fully herself in the fuzzy gulf between those expectations.
“I’m not interested in developing a growl so I can join the ranks of several rhythm and blues artists,” she told the Boston Globe in 1981. “Nor am I interested in developing a pure white tone so I can sell records to people who buy Olivia Newton-John.”
In the 1980s, Flack’s music softened and changed. Her work became a cornerstone of Quiet Storm, a radio format that featured music that coated the rough edges of 1970s R&B in a kind of soft-glowing glamour to target older, upscale audiences. Arguably, Flack had helped invent that sound. Quiet Storm took the tenderness that defined a song like The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, and tenderised it further, sometimes even into the mushier terrain of easy listening, as in Flack’s 1983 hit Tonight, I Celebrate My Love, a duet with Peabo Bryson, a younger singer whose career she helped to grow. (Flack did the same for Luther Vandross, who had been her backup singer.)
In 1996, a hip-hop inflected cover of Killing Me Softly by the Fugees went triple platinum. By then, Flack’s output was slowing down, but the mega-success of the Fugees cover afforded her a momentary renaissance. Flack appeared both in the group’s music video for the song and performed it alongside lead singer Lauryn Hill at the MTV Movie Awards. Many younger fans surely saw the collaboration as surprising — a soft-pop crooner infiltrating the world of rap — rather than as a homecoming for Flack to the kind of edgier material she’d once performed.
Flack had a stroke in January 2016 and, two years later, collapsed on stage at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. In 2020, she was honoured with a lifetime achievement award at the Grammys but declined to give a speech.
In August 2022, at age 85, Flack was diagnosed with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease). A statement released later that year relayed that she had lost the ability to sing.
The Wall Street Journal
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