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Roberta Flack Featured in People Magazine

Music Legend Digital Release of Bustin’ Loose Soundtrack Last Month

Joins the Re-Release of Her Early Catalogue

Including First Take, Chapter two, and Quiet Fire

Roberta Flack is known worldwide for her #1 singles “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” “Killing Me Softly with His Song” (which topped the charts for five weeks) and “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” her hit duets with Donny Hathaway “Where Is the Love” and “The Closer I Get to You,” and such other hits as “Tonight I Celebrate My Love” (Peabo Bryson) and “Set the Night to Music” (Maxi Priest). Flack is the first solo artist to win the GRAMMY Award for Record of the Year for two consecutive years (Billie Eilish joined Flack in this recognition with her 2021 win), and won two other GRAMMY Awards out of her total of 13 nominations. In 2020, Flack was honored with the GRAMMY Lifetime Achievement Award.

The year prior, Flack was given the prestigious Clark and Gwen Terry Courage Award from the Jazz Foundation of America, and in 2017 was presented with the Town Hall Friend of the Arts Award. She is considered one of the greatest songstresses of our time, effortlessly traversing a broad musical landscape over the years from pop to soul to folk to jazz with a voice the BBC describes as “a molten murmur [that] flexes into a cry as pure as a prayer, heartfelt as a confessional. It is elegantly tender, almost unbearably intimate.”

Music critic Ann Powers recently noted in an NPR.com profile how Flack’s career “dazzles with surprising details,” especially within the Black community. In 1971, she performed at the Soul to Soul Festival in Accra, Ghana, alongside Wilson Pickett and Ike & Tina Turner. The following year she sang at groundbreaking baseball legend Jackie Robinson’s funeral. She sang a duet with Michael Jackson on the 1974 television adaptation of the influential feminist children’s album Free To Be… You And Me. That same year she also became one of the first Black investors in the New York City radio station WBLS. Flack was the first African American to buy an apartment in the famous Dakota apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, becoming friends with her neighbors, John Lennon and Yoko Ono. In 2001, she accompanied President Bill Clinton, just out of the White House, to a Harlem AIDS fundraiser.

In 2020, Flack released First Take: 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition which included remastered versions remastered versions of the album’s eight original songs. The limited edition 2CD/1LP reissue also contained three bonus tracks (“Compared To What” single edit, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” single edit, and “Trade Winds”), a live version of “All The Way,” and 12 recordings never heard before including Flack’s performance of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” “Groove Me,” “On The Street Where You Live,” “Afro Blue,” and “Frankie and Johnny.” Since then, she has re-released more albums including Chapter Two, Quiet Fire, and Bustin’ Loose (the soundtrack to the 1981 Richard Pryor, Cicely Tyson film). She also debuted her 1971 recording of the Marvin Gaye classic “What’s Going On.”

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Read People Magazine piece online, here.

 

Roberta Flack, 85, Planning Comeback

After Stroke and COVID:

‘I Hope to See My Fans in Person Soon’

The Grammy-winning singer-songwriter hasn’t performed onstage since duetting with Valerie Simpson in 2017 at Lincoln Center in New York City.  

By Jeremy Helligar  February 25, 2022    

Legendary singer-songwriter Roberta Flack suffered a stroke in 2016 and recovered from a relatively mild breakthrough bout of COVID-19 in January. Despite the health setbacks, she has big plans for the future.  

“The pandemic has kept most of us off the stage for two years,” says Flack, 85, who is still working on regaining her strength following the stroke. “I don’t know what the next two years will hold, but I hope to see my fans in person sometime soon.”  

In the meantime, she has plenty of projects to keep her occupied. She’s looking forward to an upcoming documentary about her life and career — “I’m playing myself,” she jokes — and next year she’ll release a children’s book inspired by her very first piano, which her father rescued from a junkyard.  

“He painted it green, and it smelled bad, but I played and practiced for untold hours on that piano,” she remembers. “It gave me wings of music that as a 9-year-old girl I needed so badly. I’ve been knocked down so many times, but I kept trying. Keep trying.”  

That’s been an effective mantra for the former schoolteacher from Black Mountain, North Carolina, who had just turned 35 when she released her first big single: the timeless 1972 ballad “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” Although the song — written by English troubadour Ewan MacColl for his wife Peggy Seeger — has become a wedding staple in the decades since, Flack’s goosebump-inducing vocals were inspired not by romantic longing but by death.  

“Through the years, I’ve sung that song thousands of times, and it has taken on different stories in my life, [but] honestly, at the time it was recorded, I sang it about my cat who had just died,” Flack recalls. “I loved that cat so much. That’s the story I was telling in the recording.”  

In a way, her magical performance on the single — which won the record and song of the year Grammys, became Billboard’s No. 1 single of 1972 and will turn 50 on March 7 — was an extension of one of Flack’s greatest passions besides music. “I’m a lifelong advocate for music education for all children and for animal welfare,” says Flack, who counts 1973’s “Killing Me Softly with His Song” and 1978’s “The Closer I Get to You” among her other major hits. “At the time I recorded ‘First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,’ I dug deep for the story I would tell when I sang the song.”  

Flack recorded the future classic for her 1969 debut album, First Take, but it went virtually unnoticed until two years later when Clint Eastwood heard it on the radio and gave it prominent placement in his 1971 directorial debut Play Misty for Me.  

In addition to her biggest hit’s golden anniversary in 2022, this year is stacked with celebrations of important milestones for Flack. She turned 85 on Feb. 10, and the following day, her soundtrack album for the 1982 Richard Pryor film Bustin’ Loose received a digital re-release after being out of print for decades, in commemoration of the 40th anniversary of its release on June 5.  

“This is one of the most personally meaningful collections of music that I’ve recorded in my career,” Flack says of the project, which she co-produced, a rare move for a Black woman at the time. “I loved the story of the movie that children living in challenging situations found people who believed in them and helped them to find a better life. My heart and soul is in this music, as I wrote and co-wrote six out of the nine tracks. Each track is deeply personal to me and touches on many different aspects of my life.”  

Aside from its musical merit, Flack is proud of the album’s groundbreaking standing as an important accomplishment for a Black woman in what was then mostly a white man’s world. “It was, and to some degree, still is a rare thing for a Black female artist to be asked to produce anything for a major film or a major label,” she continues. “The glass ceiling that existed then, and let’s face it, still exists now, is gradually being pushed through, but it is a very real challenge for women of any color — especially for women of color.”  

Flack feels similarly passionate about another movie-related project that had a special birthday this month. On Feb. 8, 1982, she released the single “Making Love,” the love theme to the movie of the same name, which starred Harry Hamlin, Michael Ontkean and Kate Jackson, and told the story of a married man (Ontkean) who falls in love with another guy (Hamlin).  

It was one of the first big-screen movies released by a major Hollywood studio and featuring big-name stars to tell the story of romantic love between two gay men. Hamlin has credited the movie, which turned 40 four days after the song did, with effectively ending his film career. For Flack, her title single from the controversial movie gave her a Top 15 hit on Billboard’s Hot 100.  

“The movie was groundbreaking, with one of the first depictions of a love scene between two men,” Flack says. “This made many people uncomfortable because it forced them to see that on a big screen.”  

“What is now more widely accepted, for the most part, was at the time the movie came out, a radical theme — that two men could have a deep and complex love. Change of this nature is never easy as it means dismantling previously held beliefs. Music is powerful. I have people tell me all the time how hearing this song and seeing that movie changed their lives,” she continues, adding, “I could never be afraid to sing a song about love, whether between a man and woman, two men or two women. Love is love.”  

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