Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway, an album of duets with the troubled soul auteur, released in 1972, showcased a lighter side to Flack’s signature sound, one she explored further on 1975’s effervescent Feel Like Makin’ Love, with the title track delivering her third chart-topping single.
But it was her cover of Ewan MacColl’s folk standard The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face – an almost unbearably intimate, desolate recording, used brilliantly by Clint Eastwood in his 1971 directorial debut Play Misty for Me – that sent the album to the top of the charts, selling more than 2m copies and winning Flack the first of numerous Grammys.
In the liner notes to 2023’s Lost Takes – which excavated the tapes that had served as Roberta Flack’s audition for Atlantic Records over half a century earlier – the poet Harmony Holiday wrote that Flack possessed “the voice of the idyllic afterlife you’d want to arrive in after the end of a dysfunctional world”.
There, in a 10-hour marathon in early 1969, she recorded her debut album First Take, an uncompromising and ambitiously diverse collection comprising Leonard Cohen covers, soulful tunes penned by future collaborator Donny Hathaway and Ballad of the Sad Young Men, a powerful salute to gay men who lived their lives in secret.
At 15, she won a scholarship to study piano at Howard University, where – after the singer she’d been booked to accompany at the annual freshman talent show got cold feet – she sang Henry Nemo’s wartime pop standard Don’t Take Your Love From Me and won the competition.
