A voice like Nina Simone, Barbra Streisand, even Mahalia Jackson

As big waves crash against a wild coast, Clint Eastwood and Donna Mills walk against the wind on the beach. When they sit down after a short walk, the waves are still high enough to keep ships at anchor. In the meantime, you hear 'The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face', sung by a then virtually unknown Roberta Flack. A song that has exactly that unemphatically wild love burning in it.

That song in that film ( Play Misty for Me , 1971) – written two decades earlier by Ewan MacColl – was Flack's big breakthrough, after which she became one of the biggest soul stars of the 1970s and 1980s. Her voice had an enormous range, with great passion but without being overly emotional, even though she often sang about social issues, such as racism ('Be Real Black For Me', with Donny Hathaway) and homosexuality ('Ballad Of The Sad Young Men').

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8_fLu2yrP4

“I've been told I sound like Nina Simone, Nancy Wilson, Odetta, Barbra Streisand, Dionne Warwick, even Mahalia Jackson,” Flack told The New York Times in 1970. “When everyone says I sound like one person, I worry, but when they say I sound like all of them, I know I have my own style.”

Last weekend, Roberta Flack passed away at the age of 88 after suffering a heart attack.

Roberta Cleopatra Flack was born in 1937 in Black Mountain, North Carolina and grew up in Arlington, Virginia. Her father worked for the government, her mother was an organist in a church. The family was very musical, Roberta played the piano herself and so well that she received a scholarship to Howard University. At fifteen she was the youngest student ever. She was described as shy, awkward, diligent and always with her nose in a book. She graduated (in singing) before she was twenty, after which she started teaching.

Eastwood

Her career then took off slowly. She performed a lot, had a modest reputation as a performer and a large repertoire, but she was already in her mid-thirties when Clint Eastwood called. Thanks to his film, she shot to the top of the charts, even though the album that song was on had been out for three years.

She knew 'The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face' in the version by Joe & Eddie (1963). She sang it herself in 1969 much slower and more sensitively than her predecessors, with her cat that had been run over by a car in the back of her mind. When Eastwood called to ask if he could use it (for 2,000 dollars), she said she would re-record it, because she thought it was too slow. Eastwood would have none of it. Flack won a Grammy for it in 1973.

Roberta Flack sang 'The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face' more sensitively than her predecessors, with her cat, which was run over by a car, in the back of her mind

The song was, fittingly enough, the song that woke the Apollo 17 astronauts in orbit around the moon on the day they returned to Earth: the last time humans would see the moon up close for a while.

She would later have hits with "Feel Like Makin' Love," "The Closer I Get To You," "Tonight, I Celebrate My Love" (with Peabo Bryson) and the Burt Bacharach song "Making Love." But by far her biggest hit was "Killing Me Softly with His Song," written by Charles Fox, Norman Gimbel and Lori Lieberman. Released in 1973, it reached number one in the United States, Australia and Canada, among other countries, and earned Flack two Grammys—she became the first artist to win the Grammy Award for Record of the Year two years in a row, followed only by U2 and Billie Eilish. The song was re-recorded by the Fugees in 1996, for which they won another Grammy. The Fugees and Flack subsequently performed it together regularly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrudT410TAI

She also sang together with good friend Donny Hathaway, on the album Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway (1972), including 'You've Got a Friend', the single that was released almost simultaneously with the even more famous version by James Taylor. Their song 'Where Is the Love' did indeed become a monster hit in 1974. In 2003 again, in the version by The Black Eyed Peas. She also worked with Quincy Jones, Michael Jackson, Miles Davis, sang songs by Leonard Cohen and David Bowie and filled an entire album with covers of The Beatles - in 1975 John Lennon and Yoko Ono were her neighbors in New York.

In the 1990s and 2000s, Flack no longer achieved such great success, although she inspired many artists, such as Erykah Badu, D'Angelo, and Luther Vandross, for whom Flack was a mentor.

In 2018, Flack received both a lifetime achievement Grammy and a lifetime achievement award from the Jazz Foundation of America. That same year, she became unwell on stage, after which it turned out that she had suffered a stroke several years earlier. She had also been suffering from ALS for some time, which had prevented her from performing in recent years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVwANUbwHAU