The Many Facets of Roberta Flack
While most of Roberta Flack’s albums have just been reissued, the time has come to reconsider her work, which brought out the best in every form of great Black music, from folk and soul to jazz.
It was in 1971, the year Clint Eastwood’s feature-length directorial debut, Play Misty for Me, reached theaters, that the wider American public discovered Roberta Flack. On screen, Dave Garver, played by Eastwood, and Tobie Williams, played by Donna Mills, stroll along the beach in Carmel, California.
A few piano notes accompany the beginning of this scene, whose romantic mood contrasts with the rest of the film. Then the voice enters. The song, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” was already familiar: written in 1957 by British folk singer Ewan MacColl for Peggy Seeger, who would become his third wife, it had since been recorded by numerous artists, from Peter, Paul and Mary and Marianne Faithfull to Nana Mouskouri. But the voice heard in *Play Misty for Me* belonged to a singer who was still little known, even though she was preparing to release her third album for Atlantic.
Clint Eastwood came across the song by chance, as he recalled in a documentary broadcast on PBS: “I wanted to make a beautiful, idyllic scene in which he reconciled with his girlfriend. I heard Roberta Flack’s song on the radio while driving to work one day, and I thought, ‘Oh yes, that tells the story.’” It was an unlikely stroke of luck that brought the song to the director’s attention: not only was the recording already two years old, but it had not even been released as a single at the time. Eastwood also had to overcome the objections of Joel Dorn, the producer of the original session, who feared the track was too long and suggested either rerecording it or at least shortening the instrumental introduction. Eastwood stood firm—“I want every note, every breath”—and the original recording, all five minutes and more of it, appeared in the film.
*Play Misty for Me* enjoyed only moderate success in theaters, but audiences fell for the song. Finally released as a single in January 1972, it climbed to the top of the charts in the United States and around the world. The trade magazine Billboard named it its single of the year, and Roberta Flack won her first two Grammy Awards. Yet the singer and pianist was far from a beginner.
Roberta Cleopatra Flack was born on February 10, 1937, in Black Mountain, North Carolina, and grew up in a home steeped in music, with an amateur jazz pianist for a father and a church organist and choir director for a mother. After moving with her family to Arlington, Virginia, she began taking piano lessons at the age of nine and soon attracted attention. In 1950, when she was barely thirteen, the *Washington Afro-American* identified “Miss Roberta Flack” as one of the organists at Arlington’s Lomax African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. In her school yearbook, her classmates predicted a future for her in music, already imagining her performing at Carnegie Hall.
At fifteen, she received a scholarship to study music at Howard University in Washington, where she was one of the youngest students. Her talent allowed her to distinguish herself, and at the end of 1956 she was among thirty Howard students selected for the college edition of Who’s Who. After graduating at nineteen, she enrolled in an advanced course of study, but her father’s death in the summer of 1959 forced her to abandon it and enter the workforce. She first taught at a school in North Carolina, then returned to Washington, where she worked at several schools while giving piano lessons from her home and accompanying classical singers at the Tivoli Theatre. Her mentor, Frederick “Wilkie” Wilkerson, a vocal coach who had worked with Paul Robeson and Maya Angelou, encouraged her to enter the world of popular music.
Married to double bassist Steve Novosel, who performed with musicians including Rahsaan Roland Kirk, she had no trouble finding a place on the city’s club circuit, appearing at venues such as the 1520 Club and, beginning in 1968, Mr. Henry’s. Hired by owner Henry Jaffe to perform three nights a week, she was able to leave teaching behind and concentrate on music.
Celebrities from Burt Bacharach and Carmen McRae to Ramsey Lewis and Dionne Warwick flocked to hear her. Les McCann caught her at a benefit concert for the Inner City Ghetto Children’s Library Fund and, impressed by what he heard, secured her an audition at Atlantic. In November 1968, she spent three hours performing all forty-two songs in her repertoire for the young producer Joel Dorn, who immediately offered her a contract with the label.
A single session at Atlantic Studios on January 20, 1969, was enough to record some thirty songs, combining standards and pop material—including “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” Eight were chosen for First Take, her debut album, released the following month. Some of the rejected sides would be issued much later, as part of a 2020 anniversary edition. The record attracted little attention, however, as did its successor, Chapter Two, released the following year and marking the beginning of her long-running collaboration with Donny Hathaway.
That did not prevent Flack from building a formidable reputation onstage as she moved from clubs to festivals. In July 1969, she triumphed at the Rutgers Jazz Festival, where she stepped in at short notice for Nina Simone and even upstaged Miles Davis, with whom she shared the bill. The local newspaper ran a headline about this “unknown singer.”
The following summer, she made her European debut in Montreux at what was then still called the Golden Rose Festival. In March 1971, she traveled to Africa for the concerts preserved in the film Soul to Soul. Held to commemorate Ghana’s independence, they also featured Wilson Pickett, Ike & Tina Turner, and Les McCann with Eddie Harris.
The success of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” propelled Flack’s career into another dimension, benefiting both her first two recordings and *Quiet Fire*, released in November 1971. But it was her next record that made her even more popular. Acting on an idea from Jerry Wexler, she reunited with Donny Hathaway for a collaborative album that became a tremendous success, driven by the hit “Where Is the Love.”
A year later, she repeated the feat on her own with Killing Me Softly, which gave her a signature song in its title track, “Killing Me Softly with His Song.” She had discovered Lori Lieberman’s original version by chance on an airplane. Like Nina Simone, Flack rarely wrote songs, preferring to sing the words and notes of others, but she was nevertheless deeply involved in making her records: beginning with Quiet Fire, she received credit as an arranger.
After a few low-key production efforts for other artists—including gospel singer Marion Williams, folk singer Donal Leace, and Wayne Davis—she began producing her own albums under the pseudonym Rubina Flake, starting with *Feel Like Makin’ Love*. Released in 1975, the album included not only the Eugene McDaniels-penned title song but also Stevie Wonder’s “I Can See the Sun in Late December,” which Wonder, then working on Songs in the Key of Life, was already performing onstage.
Flack continued to act as producer, at least in part, on each of her records through 1983’s Born to Love. She reunited with Hathaway in 1977 for a duet on “The Closer I Get to You” and began preparing another album with him, but the project was abruptly halted by his death. Only two tracks were completed, and they appeared in 1980 on Roberta Flack Featuring Donny Hathaway.
A constant presence on the charts through the end of the 1970s, Flack saw her commercial success fade somewhat during the following decade. Even so, she formed a new creative partnership with singer Peabo Bryson—who died on June 2 of this year, editor’s note—and scored one final major hit with “Tonight, I Celebrate My Love” in 1983. More discreet in later years, she regularly reminded fans of her presence. She lent her voice to the mother of Michael Jackson’s character in the video for “Bad,” for example, and won over a new generation when the Fugees brought “Killing Me Softly with His Song” back into the spotlight in 1996.
From the 1990s onward, she recorded only occasionally, but she continued to perform regularly until 2016, when a stroke and neurological disorders left her unable to sing. In a fitting full-circle moment, she published The Green Piano: How Little Me Found Music in 2023, an autobiographical children’s book illustrated by Tonya Bolden, before taking her final bow in February 2025.
“The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”
Only an occasional songwriter herself, Roberta Flack had to rely on the pens of others to create her own repertoire. Like Nina Simone, she had an unerring instinct for identifying compositions she could make her own. “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” which before her had been recorded almost exclusively by folk artists, became in her hands a standard worthy of immediate entry into the illuminated pages of the Great American Songbook.
“Killing Me Softly with His Song”
Set aside the sordid dispute over the song’s origins between its two officially credited writers, Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel, and its first performer, Lori Lieberman: “Killing Me Softly with His Song” is unmistakably a Roberta Flack song, with Flack responsible for both the arrangement and the performance. Inspired by Lieberman’s reaction to a Don McLean concert, this tale of music’s emotional power is transformed by Flack, who quickens the tempo and strengthens its rhythmic force. Covered countless times from the moment it appeared—including in French by Gilbert Montagné—her version was not equaled until more than twenty years later, in 1996, when the Fugees offered their own interpretation, carried by Ms. Lauryn Hill’s voice. Hill still sings it at every concert today. On Flack’s recording, Donny Hathaway’s voice supports hers.
“Feel Like Makin’ Love”
The biggest commercial hit of Flack’s career, “Feel Like Makin’ Love” was written for her by Eugene McDaniels, whose “Compared to What” she had already covered on her debut album. More conventionally soul in form and arrangement than the music that preceded it, the song reveals the singer’s warm, even sensual side. A comparison with Isaac Hayes’s heavy-handed version, recorded the following year, only highlights the subtlety of Flack’s approach.
“The Closer I Get to You”
If one had to choose a single example of the vocal chemistry between Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway, this intensely romantic duet would be its pinnacle. Written by Reggie Lucas and James Mtume, who had just left Miles Davis’s group to join Flack’s, the song is in fact a simulated duet. Hathaway’s failing health prevented him from joining Roberta Flack in the New York studio, forcing him to record his part separately. Released a year before his death, it became the biggest hit of Hathaway’s career.
“Tonight, I Celebrate My Love”
Roberta Flack’s career is often reduced to her landmark recordings of the 1970s, but it did not end with the change of decade, as this successful duet with singer Peabo Bryson demonstrates. Despite production mannerisms that sound very dated today, and a partner who does not quite possess the stature of his predecessor, the result retains a certain charm—provided one is not too averse to saccharine.
“How Many Broken Wings”
Les McCann was the person who introduced Roberta Flack to Atlantic, and she returned the favor by contributing vocals and piano to two tracks on the pianist’s third Atlantic album. Recorded two months after her first session for the label, this lovely duet was the first of a long series for the singer.
“On a Clear Day (You Can See Forever)”
Although Quincy Jones and Roberta Flack’s collaboration on record was brief—amounting to a version of “When You’re Smiling (The Whole World Smiles with You)” on the soundtrack to Richard Brooks’s film $ (Dollars)—the singer appeared onstage with his big band several times in 1972. One such performance took place in Chicago as part of the PUSH Expo organized by Jesse Jackson. Recorded on that occasion, this shared performance of “On a Clear Day (You Can See Forever)” is one of the great moments in Save the Children, the film documenting the Expo concerts.
“You Stopped Loving Me”
Although Roberta Flack lent her voice to several soundtracks over the years, she composed only one film score: for the largely forgettable 1981 movie Bustin’ Loose, starring Richard Pryor and Cicely Tyson. For the occasion, she surrounded herself with some of the leading musicians of the day, from Marcus Miller and Barry Miles to Luther Vandross on background vocals. Vandross gave her the magnificent soul ballad “You Stopped Loving Me,” in the quiet-storm style of which he would soon become one of the foremost voices.
“Goodbye Sadness”
Beginning in the mid-1970s, Roberta Flack lived for several decades in the exclusive Dakota building at the corner of 72nd Street and Central Park West. There, she became friendly with her seventh-floor neighbors, John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Their son Sean grew close enough to call her “Aunt Roberta.” In 1984, when Ono decided to produce her own tribute album, Flack contributed a version of one of Ono’s compositions, “Goodbye Sadness.” Despite its distinctly dated production, Flack delivers a minimalist yet deeply emotional interpretation that elevates the songwriter’s original.
“Flower”
This is surely the most improbable record of Roberta Flack’s entire career. In 1999, a Japanese label released Friends: Roberta Flack Sings Mariko Takahashi, an album devoted to English-language adaptations of songs by Japanese pop singer Mariko Takahashi. Produced by Jerry and Katreese Barnes, regular Flack collaborators who also wrote the English lyrics, the album was not distributed outside Japan. Even so, it confirmed that Flack had lost none of her power as an interpreter.