Roberta Flack: 'My music is my expression of what I feel in a moment'

On a Roberta Flack record, everything moves slowly. The beats tarry, encouraging the instruments to treat them with grace and the singer to savor every note. When Flack sings a song, she caresses each cadence, considering and intensifying them, the better to realize the full meaning of the lyric. It’s a one-of-a-kind style, often misconstrued as minimalist or middle-of-the-road. In fact, it contains many complex and roiling parts, and, often, it escalates to a vocal crescendo so thunderous it could shake a concert hall to its core.

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Last year marked half a century since Flack introduced that style to the world on her debut album, First Take, which offered a daring contrast to the conventional pop, soul or jazz releases of its day. Not only did it break with common genre boundaries, it challenged racial stereotypes, presenting a very different, and highly personal, definition of soul. More, it culminated in a song, All the Sad Young Men, that offered one of the most shattering depictions of pre-Stonewall gay life ever recorded.

Flack’s records sold in massive numbers between the early 70s and the early 80s, a stretch in which she amassed six gold albums, one platinum and one double-platinum work. At her peak, in 1973 and 74, she became the only artist ever to win the song of the year Grammy twice in a row, first for The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, next with Killing Me Softly with His Song. To amplify that feat, this Sunday’s Grammys will feature a rare appearance by the now 82-year-old Flack to accept the Recording Academy’s lifetime achievement award. “It’s a tremendous and overwhelming honor,” the singer wrote in an email, which is the only way she communicates with the press after a stroke last year which has had an effect on her speech. “I’ve tried my entire career to tell stories through my music. This award is a validation to me that my peers heard my thoughts and took in what I have tried to give.”

In the email, Flack broke news that, in March, Rhino Records will release a 50th anniversary reconsideration of First Take, buttressed by bonus tracks. “It will include some of the songs I recorded for my audition for Atlantic Records to get my record deal in 1968,” she wrote. It will “include This Could Be the Start of Something New and other jazz-oriented songs”.

When First Take initially appeared, at the end of the 60s, it didn’t receive the acclaim it would later garner. It took almost three years for the album to catch on, by which time Flack had had already released two more impressive solo albums, Chapter 2 and Quiet Fire. Flack’s breakthrough came through a fluke. One day Clint Eastwood heard her version of Ewan MacColl’s oft-recorded The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, which appeared on her debut, on his car radio. “He called me at home in Alexandria, Virginia,” Flack wrote. “I couldn’t believe Clint Eastwood was calling me. I almost passed out!”

He told her he wanted to use her record in a movie that would be his directorial debut, Play Misty For Me, a thriller about a female stalker that served as a kind of precursor to Fatal Attraction. “He wanted to use my song only in a part of the movie where there was pure and absolute love,” wrote Flack. “I told him OK, but that I wanted to re-record it because I thought it was too slow. He said: ‘No, it’s not.’”

The film became a hit, and so did the song (for which Eastwood paid just $2,000), ending up as Billboard’s No 1 single for 1972. The next year, it won both the record and song of the year Grammy. And the First Take album shot to the top of Billboard’s Top 200, selling nearly 2m copies in the process. By the time of her breakthrough, Flack was “old” by pop standards, 33, with a long history in music. She grew up in North Carolina, where her mother was a church organist who encouraged her daughter’s interest in music. At nine, she began to play classical piano, which she continued studying through her time at Howard University, which she entered when she was just 15.

After graduating four years later, she began to teach music and English in her new home of Washington DC. By night, she sang and played piano at local clubs, having moved on from classical works to perform blues, folk and pop standards. At a popular local spot, Mr Henry’s, she earned a loyal audience and, there, she was discovered by jazz singer/pianist Les McCann. He got her an audition with the label he recorded for, Atlantic Records, whose tsar, Ahmet Ertegun, signed her based on the massive repertoire of songs she not only performed but arranged. Working with producer Joel Dorn, who would later oversee Bette Midler’s debut for Atlantic, she recorded her debut in 10 hours, a feat reflected in the album’s title, First Take. The set featured just eight songs, unified by their languorous length and the singer’s contemplative style. Yet, the compositions themselves varied widely.

The opening, Compared to What, which had been recorded earlier by McCann, spat out a biting critique of the Vietnam war in a lyric that also attacked the public’s apathy (“We’re all chicken feathers / without one gut,” Flack sniped, over her sarcastic piano). The song’s socio-political focus found a kindred spirit in another piece on the album, Tryin’ Times, co-written by Flack’s college friend, singer Donny Hathaway. In between, she sang a song in Spanish, Angelitos Negros, interpreted a Leonard Cohen piece, Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye, and delivered another song co-written by Hathaway, Our Ages or Our Hearts, about an intergenerational love affair.

Still, the most dramatic song was a seven-minute rumination called Ballad of the Sad Young Men, whose lyrics, by Fran Landesman, originally appeared in a 1959 musical about the Beat Generation titled The Nervous Set. A highly literate piece, the song spoke of lonely young men drawn to a bar where they forever seek “someone they can love / for just a little while”. They’re caught in a loop, “drinking up the night / trying not to drown,” while “choking on their youth” as age beckons. At the song’s astounding climax, Flack hits a note of operatic power. “Fran Landesman is one of the greatest lyricists of all time,” Flack wrote. “I sang it about soldiers, then, later, about gay men. It touches me deeply every time. I used to perform this song at Mr Henry’s and people would be totally silent. I knew it moved them.”

Performances like that, and those on the rest of the album, cast Flack as an ace cabaret interpreter. Only one track on the album, the traditional I Told Jesus, had any root in gospel music. Likewise, little of the music referenced gutsy soul. In the process, Flack upended every stereotype about the kinds of sounds an African American artist could successfully market. “I didn’t try to be a soul singer, a jazz singer, a blues singer – no category,” Flack wrote. “My music is my expression of what I feel and believe in a moment.”

As a result, she sometimes endured accusations of being “too white”, a prejudicial view which, she admits, hurt. “Of course, it did,” she wrote. “I hope that one day we will be seen for the people we are, not for our race, gender, age or nationality.”

She also endured criticism from the very person who wrote The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face. A true folk purist, and a famously unforgiving critic, MacColl found her version overplayed and florid. But the public loved it, and the one-two punch of First Time and Killing Me Softly shot Flack to the pinnacle of pop stardom. “It was unexpected and breathtaking,” she wrote. “The transition from my life in Washington as a teacher into this kind of attention was surreal.”

This time, however, it was no fluke. Unlike, say, Christopher Cross, who won all the top Grammys then largely disappeared, Flack kept her career going strong, earning gold albums and great respect for her duets with Donny Hathaway, including their top five smash The Closer I Get To You, and scoring another No 1 for herself with the sensual Feel Like Making Love, penned by the same writer, Gene McDaniels, who wrote Compared to What. Along the way, she managed to escape the marginalization that befell Nina Simone, another classically trained African American artist who spent much of her career radically reinterpreting pop standards. Flack’s most recent album, Let It Be Roberta, from 2012, found her putting her own stamp on songs by the Beatles. It won her critical acclaim, as well as the approval of her across-the-hall neighbor at the Dakota in New York, Yoko Ono.

Due to her stroke, Flack no longer sings in public, but, in private, she reports that she does so “all the time”. And she has lots of projects in the fire, including a memoir, a musical collaboration with Debbie Allen and a film documentary about her life. Throughout it all, Flack has retained the same, essential vocal approach – one that’s deliberate, deep and slow. “It’s how I express my feelings,” she wrote. “It’s just my way.”