In one of her last interviews before her death on Feb. 24, four-time Grammy Award-winning music legend Roberta Flack explained that her career was defined by a song she loved to sing as a little girl in Sunday school.
The 1859 hymn “Jesus Loves Me,” by Anna Bartlett Warner, was her favorite song to sing in church. She said that when she was 6 or 7, they needed someone to sing and play the piano, and she took on the challenge. “I was really lucky,” she recalled. “That’s when I began to realize that I could really do something.”
She also remembered the day her father came home with an upright piano that he had found in a junkyard and fixed up.
She was born into a musical family on Feb. 10, 1937, in Black Mountain, North Carolina, and grew up in Arlington, Virginia.
Hymns and spirituals she heard while growing up at the Lomax African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church helped shape her love for all types of music, including gospel, jazz, classical, opera, blues, and country. She said that “the first time I heard a Chopin prelude, I started to cry because Chopin is so emotional, so romantic, and so beautiful.” She also looked forward to attending a Baptist church to hear the gospel music of her musical heroes, Mahalia Jackson and Sam Cooke.
Flack would go on to excel at classical piano while attending Howard University in Washington on a full music scholarship. She ultimately changed her major from piano to voice and became the assistant conductor of the university choir.
She became a fan of opera and directed a well-received production of “Aida,” and later performed with acclaimed opera singers while working as a backing pianist at the Tivoli Club in Washington, D.C.
“For a person who was born in the ghetto like I was, to be in a situation where people walked in and said, play Gershwin, play an aria from ‘La Boheme,’ play something from ‘La Traviata’ … I could deliver that,” she said.
Jazz pianist and singer Les McCann saw Flack perform at the Tivoli Club and was so impressed with what he witnessed that he arranged an audition for her at Atlantic Records. Shortly after, the label issued her first album, appropriately titled “First Take,” in 1969. While the album received strong reviews, it wasn’t until the song “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” was included in Clint Eastwood’s movie “Play Misty For Me” that Flack’s career took off.
The song, written in 1957 by folk singer-songwriter Ewan MacColl and previously recorded by Peggy Seeger and Gordon Lightfoot, remained at No. 1 on the pop chart for six weeks.
The album also included the traditional gospel hymn “I Told Jesus” and a haunting cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.”
Her second album, “Chapter Two,” was released in 1970, and although it did not include any hits, it did feature Flack covering some classic songs by Bob Dylan, Buffy Saint Marie, and Jimmy Webb. It also included the gospel story-song “Reverend Lee,” a scathing tale about a black Southern Baptist minister who she informs us “thinks he has his program all together until he runs up against a lady who shows him that he ain’t got it together.”
The woman is identified as Satan’s daughter, who infiltrates his dreams with the song, ultimately becoming a battle between God and the devil for the soul of Reverend Lee.
Flack was very much involved with the Civil Rights Movement, and her third album, “Quiet Fire,” includes the gospel song “Go Up Moses,” which she wrote with the Rev. Jesse Jackson and admitted was inspired by Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.” The song’s lyrics read like an anthem: “Go up Moses, you’ve been down too long; Go up Moses, sing your freedom song.” It’s a powerful plea for equal rights, and Flack’s delivery is nothing short of mesmerizing.
In 1972, Flack also released the critically acclaimed duet album “Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway,” which included the No. 5 hit “Where Is the Love.” Six years later, Flack and Hathaway would score an even bigger hit with “The Closer I Get to You.”
In 1973, Flack scored her second No. 1 hit with “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” written by Charlie Fox, Norman Gimbel, and Lori Lieberman. The song was inspired by Lieberman attending a Don McLean concert and being so moved that she wrote the lyrics about how his music made her feel. It won Flack the 1974 Grammy for Record of the Year and Best Female Pop Performance.
That same year, she scored a Top 30 hit with the heartfelt ballad “Jesse,” and, in 1974, she reached the Billboard pop summit with the ballad “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” from her first self-produced album of the same name.
The album contained another religious song, “Some Gospel According to Matthew,” written by Brooklyn-born songwriter Stuart Scharf. The song demonstrates Flack’s desire to seek wisdom from the Bible in holding on to a relationship she values in the lines, “If you seek then you shall find, If you’ve no faith then never mind; I’m letting you know how it looks towards the end of the line, which according to Matthew is just a matter of time.”
During the 1980s, Flack scored two more Top 20 hits and ushered in the 1990s with her last charting single, the No. 6 “Set the Night to Music” — a duet with Maxi Priest.
On Oct. 7, 1995, Flack, along with Natalie Cole and Jon Secada, performed a concert in Central Park for Pope John Paul II. Flack sang “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” for the pontiff and joined Cole and Secada for an unforgettable rendition of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” She described the all-star group as “the warm-up singers for the pope.”
From a small-town Southern girl singing in her local church to performing before South African President Nelson Mandela and Pope John Paul II, Roberta Flack’s faith in God carried her through an illustrious career as one of the finest entertainers of her generation.
And there’s no doubt all her fans and music lovers the world over will forever celebrate her love and her legacy.