NEW YORK (AP) — In an era where popular music is fluid, it is easy to forget the listening world was not always so open. Unless, of course, Roberta Flack’s career is closely examined.
Flack, whose intimate vocal and musical style made her one of the top recording artists of the 1970s and an influential performer long after, died Monday. She leaves behind a rich repertoire of music that avoids categorization. Her debut, “First Take,” wove soul, jazz, flamenco, gospel and folk into one revelatory package, prescient in its form and measured in its approach.
Flack will likely be remembered for her classics — “The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face” and “Killing Me Softly with His Song” among them. As she should be. But her talents extend well beyond the familiar titles.
Read on and then listen to all of the tracks on our Spotify playlist, here.
1969: “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye”
Picking one standout from “First Take” is a fool’s errand, but listeners would be wise to spend time with Flack’s cover of the Leonard Cohen classic “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye,” a strong case for a reimagination eclipsing the original. Her voice transforms Cohen’s lament. It’s almost impossible to believe this song, let alone the entire record, was recorded over a period of just 10 hours at Atlantic Studios in New York in February 1969. But it was.
Also from “First Take” is “Angelitos Negros,” performed entirely in Spanish by Flack. It’s a song based on a poem by the Venezuelan writer Andrés Eloy Blanco titled “Píntame Angelitos Negros,” with a title lifted from the 1948 Mexican film of the same name.
The movie navigates interracial relationships when a white couple gives birth to a dark-skinned child. Beyond Flack’s soaring vocal performance — delivered atop a robust string section and nylon-string guitars — the song serves as an anthem against racial discrimination and a stunning example of the singer’s cross-boundary approach to music making.
1972: “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”
As the well-documented lore suggests, Roberta Flack’s mainstream success story begins when her dreamy cover of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” written by English folk artist Ewan MacColl for his wife Peggy Seeger, was used in a love scene between Clint Eastwood and Donna Mills in his 1971 film “Play Misty for Me.”
It quickly topped the Billboard pop chart in 1972 and received a Grammy for record of the year. But her relationship with the song, and her singular ability to bring it to such great heights, was almost kismet. Before recording the ballad, she had real familiarity with it, having taught it while working with a glee club during her years as an educator.
1973: “Killing Me Softly with His Song”
It is Flack’s best-known hit and one of the great love songs of the 20th Century. Flack first heard Lori Lieberman’s “Killing Me Softly with His Song” while on a plane and immediately fell in love with it. While on tour with Quincy Jones, she covered the song, and the audience feel in love with it, too, as they’d continue to for decades.
Her voice is otherworldly in her recording — pinpointing a kind of neo-soul R&B that would dominate for years to come — and she was recognized for it. Flack became the first artist to win consecutive Grammys for best record with this one.
The song would win again in the ‘90s, when hip-hop trio the Fugees’ would offer their masterful take on Flack’s cover and introduce much of the world to singer Lauryn Hill’s gift.
1975: “Feel Like Makin’ Love”
A standard for R&B and jazz musicians alike — no doubt due to the grandeur of Flack’s version — “Feel Like Makin’ Love” is her third career No. 1. It’s a mediative seduction, Flack embodying each lyrical vignette in her delivery. “Strollin’ in the park / Watchin’ winter turn to spring,” she opens the song, “Walkin’ in the dark / Seein’ lovers do their thing.”
1978: “The Closer I Get to You”
A soulful collaboration with her close friend Donny Hathaway, “The Closer I Get to You,” is a reflective romance, both big-voiced and bigger-hearted singers lifting each other up. But despite its splendor, the song’s legacy is marred in tragedy: In 1979, Flack and Hathaway started work on an album of duets when he suffered a breakdown during recording and fell to his death from his hotel room in Manhattan.
1983: “Tonight, I Celebrate My Love”
The ‘80s brought soft rock detouring for Flack, another experimentation for the innovative performer. “Tonight, I Celebrate My Love,” a duet with the R&B balladeer Peabo Bryson, is at the intersection of a few genres and simultaneously timeless — a feat for a song anchored in shimmery, synthetized production.
1991: “Set the Night to Music”
In her later career, Flack continued to meet the current moment. A great example is “Set the Night to Music,” a glossy pop song with English singer Maxi Priest. It was released on her 1991 album of the same name, which also features a then-contemporary cover of Philadelphia soul group The Stylistics’ 1970s R&B hit “You Make Me Feel Brand New.”
