Roberta Flack

Roberta Flack's recordings have frequently been characterized as elegant, cosmopolitan, understated, polished, and refined, above all the romantic and gently jazz-tinged ballads that defined much of her 1970s output and that still receive regular airplay on adult-contemporary stations favoring middle-of-the-road programming. Born to a church organist, she began studying piano early, earned a music scholarship, and completed a degree at Howard University before briefly working as a student teacher. Jazz pianist Les McCann heard her performing in a club, which led to her signing with Atlantic Records.

Although her debut album, First Take (1969), and its follow-up, Chapter Two (1970), earned positive notices, neither yielded a charting single at the time. Inclusion of her interpretation of Ewan MacColl's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" on the soundtrack of the 1971 film Play Misty for Me changed that trajectory; the track reached number one in 1972, held the position for six weeks, and ranked as the year's biggest hit. She next teamed with fellow Howard alumnus Donny Hathaway for the duet "Where Is the Love," then scored her second chart-topping single with the five-week number-one "Killing Me Softly with His Song" in 1973. After another number-one hit in 1974 with "Feel Like Makin' Love," Flack stepped back from live work to focus on studio projects and philanthropic efforts.

She returned to the charts periodically, most notably with the Top Ten 1977 album Blue Lights in the Basement, which included the number-two ballad "The Closer I Get to You" recorded with Hathaway. The suicide of her frequent collaborator in 1979 dealt a severe blow; after a period of recovery, she began working with Peabo Bryson, joining him on tour in 1980 and recording the hit duet "Tonight, I Celebrate My Love" with him in 1983.

Throughout the rest of the 1980s she maintained an active schedule of orchestral concerts and appeared on several occasions alongside Miles Davis. A further Top Ten entry arrived in 1991 with the Maxi Priest duet "Set the Night to Music," featured on the album of the same title. Her 1994 release Roberta presented new readings of jazz and popular standards. Entering the twenty-first century, she issued recordings only sporadically, among them the 2012 collection Let It Be Roberta: Roberta Flack Sings the Beatles, whose poised and evenly balanced vocal approach remained undiminished. That same year Varese Sarabande issued a carefully remixed edition of her 1997 holiday collection Christmas Songs—originally released by Capitol Records as The Christmas Album—adding the previously unavailable track "Cherry Tree Carol."