The Virtuoso
Turning the Tables is NPR's ongoing multi-platform series dedicated to recentering the popular music canon on voices that have been marginalized, underappreciated, or hidden in plain sight. In 2020, we will publish an occasional series looking closely at the careers of significant women in music, treasured albums or significant scenes. This is the first in the series; find all Turning the Tables content here.
Listen to a playlist of songs from across Roberta Flack's career.
Roberta Flack has always held two souls within her body. From her childhood days onward, she was herself, the daughter of a draftsman and a church choir organist who learned to play music at her mother's knee. This Roberta strove to understand both Chopin and Methodist hymnody and was precocious enough to gain admission to Howard University at 15. She was a shy, awkward, diligent girl with her nose always in a book and fingers tired from practicing piano scales.
Even then, in her deepest being, she was also Rubina Flake, renowned concert artiste, effortlessly dazzling Carnegie Hall crowds with her performances. Rubina helped Roberta endure the indignities faced by gifted black children in the South, as when she'd sing "Carry Me Back To Old Virginny" for contest judges in hotels where she wasn't allowed to stay the night. Her alter ego helped her feel glamorous and capable when others told her she was imperfect. Rubina had no need to respect others' restrictions. She was a diva, surrounded by bouquets of backstage flowers and the approval of an elite who didn't describe her as having "a chipmunk smile and a nut-brown face."
Flack graduated from Howard with dreams of becoming an opera singer. Discouragement from a vocal coach led her to reconsider and turn toward music education as a career and popular music as an avocation. She taught in rural North Carolina and at several Washington, D.C.- area schools, eventually establishing herself as a nightclub performer on the side. Her repertoire and her warmth as a performer made her a sensation at Capitol Hill's Mr. Henry's, where she played up the classical elements in folk revival ballads and Motown hits, explaining how she did so as she went along — "it's based on an interesting baroque form called the passacaglia," she'd tell the crowd, offering a song, maybe, by Leonard Cohen. It was this unexpected blend of elements, not only in repertoire, but playing out within each song, that drew other musicians like the soul jazz pioneer Les McCann to Flack. After a night at Mr. Henry's he decided he needed to hook her up with his producer, Joel Dorn. Dorn soon signed Flack to Atlantic Records, and in 1969 they made First Take, the debut effort in a recording career that would bring her 18 Billboard-charting songs, four Grammy awards and 13 nominations and, at this year's Grammys, lifetime achievement awards.
"I always say that 'love is a song' — meaning that music reaches beyond age, race, nationality and religion to touch our hearts," Roberta Flack recently wrote when asked by email to reflect upon the breadth of her career. (She mostly speaks to journalists this way now, having suffered some health setbacks in recent years.) Flack is 83 today — her birthday — and a titan in the eyes of many fellow artists and discerning fans.
