Roberta Flack
Roberta Cleopatra Flack (born February 10, 1937)[2][3] is a retired American singer who topped the Billboard charts with the No. 1 singles "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face", "Killing Me Softly with His Song", "Feel Like Makin' Love", "Where Is the Love" and "The Closer I Get to You", the latter two duets with Donny Hathaway.
Flack influenced the subgenre of contemporary R&B called quiet storm, and interpreted songs by songwriters such as Leonard Cohen and members of the Beatles.[4]
Flack was the first artist to win the Grammy Award for Record of the Year in two consecutive years: "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" won in 1973 and "Killing Me Softly with His Song" won in 1974.
Early life and education[edit]
Flack was born in Black Mountain, North Carolina, to parents Laron Flack, a Veterans Administration draftsman,[5] and Irene (née Council)[6] Flack[7] a church organist,[8] on February 10, 1937[9][3][2] (some sources have cited 1939 but the 1940 Census gives Roberta's age as 3 years old).[10][11] She grew up in Arlington, Virginia.[12]
Growing up in a large, musical family, she often accompanied the choir of Lomax African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church by playing hymns and spirituals on piano, but she also enjoyed going to the "Baptist church down the street" to listen to contemporary gospel music including songs performed by Mahalia Jackson and Sam Cooke.[13]
When Flack was nine, she started taking an interest in playing the piano.[7] During her early teens, Flack excelled at classical piano and Howard University awarded her a full music scholarship.[14]
By age 15, she entered Howard University in Washington, D.C., making her one of the youngest students ever to enroll there. She eventually changed her major from piano to voice and became an assistant conductor of the university choir. Her direction of a production of Aida received a standing ovation from the Howard University faculty.
Flack became a student teacher at a school near Chevy Chase, Maryland. She graduated from Howard University at 19 and began graduate studies in music there, but the sudden death of her father forced her to take a job teaching music and English in Farmville, North Carolina.[15]
Career[edit]
Early career[edit]
Before becoming a professional singer-songwriter, Flack returned to Washington, D.C., and taught at Banneker, Browne, and Rabaut Junior High Schools. She also taught private piano lessons out of her home on Euclid Street, NW in the city. During that time, her music career began to take shape on evenings and weekends in D.C. area night spots.
At the Tivoli Club, she accompanied opera singers at the piano. During intermissions, she would sing blues, folk, and pop standards in a back room, accompanying herself on the piano. Later she performed several nights a week at the 1520 Club, again providing her own piano accompaniment. About this time her voice teacher, Frederick "Wilkie" Wilkerson, told her that he saw a brighter future for her in pop music than in the classics. Flack modified her repertoire accordingly and her reputation spread. In 1968 she began singing professionally when she was hired to perform regularly at Mr. Henry's Restaurant, which is on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.[16][17]
Critical reputation[edit]
In 1971, Village Voice critic Robert Christgau reported that "Flack is generally regarded as the most significant new black woman singer since Aretha Franklin, and at moments she sounds kind, intelligent, and very likable. But she often exhibits the gratuitous gentility you'd expect of someone who says 'between you and I'." Reviewing her body of work from the 1970s, he later argued that the singer "has nothing whatsoever to do with rock and roll or rhythm and blues and almost nothing to do with soul", comparing her middle-of-the-road aesthetic to Barry Manilow but with better taste, which he believed does not necessarily guarantee more enduring music: "In the long run, pop lies are improved by vulgarity."[13]
Writer and music critic Ann Powers argued in a 2020 piece for NPR that "Flack's presence looms over both R&B and indie "bedroom" pop as if she were one of the astral beings in Ava DuVernay's version of A Wrinkle In Time." [4] Jason King argued that she occupies a complex place in popular music, as "the nature of her power as a performer—to generate rapturous, spellbinding mood music and to plumb the depths of soulful heaviness by way of classically-informed technique—is not too easy to claim or make sense with the limited tools that we have in music criticism."[4]
Flack's minimalist, classically trained approach to her songs was seen by a number of critics as lacking in grit and uncharacteristic of soul music. According to music scholar Jason King, her work was regularly described with the adjectives "boring", "depressing", "lifeless", "studied", and "calculated"};[13] in contrast, AllMusic's Steve Huey said it has been called "classy, urbane, reserved, smooth, and sophisticated".[28]