Four ways Roberta Flack expressed her creative versatility

There are musicians, stars, entertainers, and then there’s Roberta Flack. For any Black kid growing up in a house full of records purchased by their parents, it’s inconceivable to believe Roberta Flack’s music was not a part of your life, like Sesame Street and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

From pop music featured in Clint Eastwood movies to affiliations with Les McCann, Flack attained singer-songwriter elite status and garnered message-singer status from Rev. Jessie Jackson, who would call on Flack to perform during civil rights events. She had a close association with Donny Hathaway, Luther Vandross, and was even a neighbor and friend to Yoko Ono and John Lennon while living in The Dakota, as well as being godmother to Bernard (Nard) Wright.

It’s difficult for me to abide by an obituary-type assessment of Flack because she was everywhere. Not even in grand performative form, but just living a large life that a one-time child prodigy fulfilled into an exquisite existence led by her genius talent and indomitable creative mind. So many of these obits will say at this or that point her output waned, but completely deny the fact her Quiet Storm phase inspired some of the most prolific producers in this 21st Century.

Flack, the former schoolteacher who passed away on February 25 at the age of 88 after a short battle with ALS, is one of the greatest arrangers and musicians of her generation—and even that assessment is underscored. So, as she put it: “I didn’t try to be a soul singer, a jazz singer, a blues singer—no category,” she told The Guardian in a 2020 interview. “My music is my expression of what I feel and believe in a moment.”

Flack possessed elegance and finesse in the delivery of her story-songs. An understanding that bringing your audience in was first and foremost important before you advance the arrangement. “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” puts the listener into every emotion without being rushed or overpowered with vocal gymnastics. See, that’s the thing; Flack could have done all of that, but she knew giving the ears agency to the fragility of the moment didn’t just sound better but carried that human window to empathy.

She compacted zillions of these moments into a career that elevated her talent to the masses, but in a macro-type perspective, she never stopped teaching and influencing others, and that reaches beyond all the music accolades; it speaks to the evergreen, genial nature of her craft. Always warm, earthy.

Join us as we attempt to unlock The Genius of Roberta Flack:

First Take

“Her voice touched, tapped, trapped, and kicked every emotion I’ve ever known. I laughed, cried, and screamed for more.” – Les McCann, The Guardian 

Call it the traffic corner dance of commerce, protest and edict. “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” was included by Clint Eastwood in his 1971 film Play Misty for Me. The song became a number 1 hit in the United States, and Roberta Flack’s debut album First Take reached number 1 on the Billboard album chart and Billboard R&B album chart. But it’s the bassline from Ron Carter that sets the mood for the matter-of-fact burner statement “Compared To What” that played incessantly on jukeboxes in black beauty salons, black barber shops, and certainly black radio. Just a touch of Nina Simone’s indignation through Flack’s voice makes the lead track a memorandum on front-page stories in circulation throughout the country, whether it be the man on the moon or black and young progressive folks catching hell in the streets.

McCann arranged the audition for Flack with Atlantic Records and she delivered 42 songs in three hours for her producer Joel Dorn. In November 1968 she recorded 39 song demos in less than 10 hours, 3.9 songs per hour from a human.

First Take, which came from these instant output sessions, reminds listeners that Roberta Flack, who jumped on the smooth R&B bandwagon of success she had in the ’80s, started with tough message music and serious jazz piano chops at the outset. Where Sly’s There’s a Riot Going On gives the headline, “First Take” delivers the quotes from the populace as it’s happening.

Free to Produce Herself in 1975

Anyone familiar with my previous writings knows that thrift stores, specifically in San Francisco’s Mission District, have been my treasure trove of sorts, an education by the persistent delivered by way of pennies on the dollar.

I found the Feel Like Makin’ Love album many years ago at Community Thrift, 623 Valencia, in SF’s Mission district. The patchwork art on the cover immediately struck me, so I paid two bucks, brought it home, and bugged out. So yes, this was the singer’s first album to be produced by Flack herself, under the pseudonym Rubina Flake, which was a big deal. A woman controlling the knobs of the output at a time when mostly men produced. But then it gets a degree deeper.  

There is a track by Stevie Wonder called “I Can See the Sun in Late December”; it’s a 12-minute arrangement that, when you give it its proper space to unfurl, has an ambient, meditative streak that plays out. I always wanted to sample it—was that ’97-ish?—but beyond that, looking at the depth of talent on this album, and this tune as well—Bob James, Anthony Jackson, Alphonse Mouzon, Idris Muhammad, Patti Austin, Deniece Williams—meaning the respect was already there for her.  

In a short amount of time, these musicians saw the genius and trusted her judgment.

Influence and Ability to Identify Landmark Talent

Roberta Flack met Donny Hathaway at Howard University; they were music enthusiasts. More accurately, they were landmark singer-songwriters able to traverse soul, R&B, jazz, and ballads, boasting instantly recognizable voices that could captivate a crowd in seconds. It is believed they recognized the genius within each other. Hathaway a singer, keyboardist, songwriter, backing vocalist, and arranger who Rolling Stone described as a “soul legend” had that other presence.

Donny Hathaway Live is one of those concert performances that immediately immerses you in the show. You’re singing along with Donny, high-fiving the audience members caught live on the record, and it just moves with power and grace, acknowledging the performer Hathaway is at his apex. I mean, who in the eff is covering arrangements by Marvin Gaye, Carole King and John Lennon songs? Who says, “that’s the American songbook I’ll rock with”? Donny Hathaway does. Like Flack, his tastes rotated around solid songwriting and impeccable charts, not just songs that stayed within the idiom people assumed “these Black artists” would just churn away at. No, buddy, these are virtuosos, constantly reaching for songs, serving the arrangement.

When the two linked up for duets, it was sheer magic. “The Closer I Get To You” puts listeners in the middle of an intimate moment, while “Where Is The Love” asks the musical question, “Why aren’t things popping anymore?” Both songs, by the way, were certified gold.

Even the posthumous release of “Back Together Again,” an early boogie joint, shows these titans trading back and forth with ease and good-natured verve. It would be later sampled by Biz Markie for the deep crate hip-hop cut “Spring Again.” Hathaway’s ability to see his sound in the most original settings and then having the ability to work with a dear friend such as Flack makes the fact that he passed tragically at the age of 33 inform us all that we missed another brilliant musical mind before even his full potential.

Luther Vandross sang background vocals for Roberta Flack. But it seems there is a bit more to this story. In the CNN documentary Never Too Much, Vandross explains he might have overstepped his ground a bit.

“Roberta would sometimes have interviews, and sometimes she’d be unable to show up for sound checks. So I would sing her songs for her in soundchecks to test the microphones,” Vandross explained. “What happened is one day she had come back to the theater and I was singing. And she came over to me and said, ‘You know, you’re getting a little too comfortable sitting on this stool in the background singing oohs and ahhs. I want you to make your own statement and make your record, you know?’ And she, in effect, fired me.”

Years later, Flack would share her version of the story with CNN and pushed back on Vandross’ narrative, explaining that she didn’t “fire him” in the traditional sense but ultimately gave him the freedom to explore his talents and make a name for himself without her.

“Luther Vandross likes to say that I fired him, but I never really fired him. What I did was to encourage him to believe in his own ability to produce his first album,” she said.

No matter which take you believe, Flack indeed saw what everyone else saw in Vandross: undeniable talent that needed center spotlight.

Quiet Storm

In the late ’70s and early ’80s, Black radio was at a new intersect. The cultural war against disco cut way back on that format being dominant, with the exceptions of urban centers such as New York City, D.C., L.A., etc. That whole disco national phenomenon went away soon, like right after the Chicago Disco Demolition night. As ushers and retail food workers, who are Black, said on the night of, the records they were destroying were not just disco records; they were destroying all records made, in fact, by Black people. It was a cultural assassination.

Quiet Storm was a programming niche from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s that saw late-night DJs on Black radio play an ever-evolving grouping of pop, jazz fusion, and R&B ballads that was devoid of any significant political commentary. Whether it was good or bad is indifferent; it gave Black radio a new direction to aim when America killed off disco. Roberta Flack’s early canon of ballads easily worked its way through this new arbiter of what personified US Black middle-class life. Even later cuts “Making Love” and the Peabo Bryson duet “Tonight, I Celebrate My Love” became standards in this format.

Then, in the late ’90s, hip-hop producers started to sample this genre, using that general warmth or blandness, depending on the track, to communicate a new color in the beat-driven genre. MF DOOM, who sometimes doesn’t get props for his sampling simplicity, took normal records—not expensive rare joints, but records from the library or your parents (what you might think would be a boring collection) into bangers. The Fugees, Nas, JAY-Z, MF DOOM, Dr. Dre, 2Pac, Cam’ron, 9th Wonder, De La Soul, and Jadakiss all found gold in those Flack records.

Treble is supported by its patrons. Become a member of our Patreon, get access to subscriber benefits, and help an independent media outlet continue delivering articles like these.