Her chart-topping hits “Killing Me Softly” and “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” led her obituaries. But the first track, “Compared to What,” on her debut album First Take is key to understanding the virtuoso Roberta Flack, who died this week at the age of 88.
Released at the height of the Vietnam War in June 1969, the lyrics decry the political division that surrounded it: “Nobody gives us rhyme or reason/ Have one doubt, they call it treason.” Touching on the social issues of religion, abortion, and economic inequality, the song launched a career that Rev. Jesse Jackson famously described as “socially relevant and politically unafraid.”
Decades before most pop artists embraced LGBTQ rights in their performances, Flack made “The Ballad of the Sad Young Man” a staple of her concerts.
“I’m deeply saddened that many of the songs I recorded 50 years ago about civil rights, equal rights, poverty, hunger and suffering in our society are still relevant,” she said in a 2020 interview. “I hope that people will hear these songs in a new way as they connect to their lives today, to this pandemic, to the growing economic disparities, to Black Lives Matter, to police brutality, to activism versus apathy, and the need for each of us to see it and address it. I will continue to use my music to touch hearts, tell my truth, and encourage people always to do whatever they can, however they can, to make the world better.”
She learned to play on a piano her father salvaged from a junkyard and painted green — a gift she immortalized in her 2023 children’s book, The Green Piano: How Little Me Found Music.
At just 19 years old, she earned a bachelor’s degree in music and began graduate studies at Howard University — just as future National Urban League Executive Director Vernon Jordan was beginning law school there. The death of her father forced her to leave school and take on a job teaching music and English at a segregated school in North Carolina, the state where she was born. “The Negroes went to town shopping only on Saturdays,” she told the New York Times in 1970. Some of her students would have to miss school to pick tobacco, but showed up to after-school music rehearsals.
Surviving segregation
She continued teaching in Washington, D.C. public schools and moonlighted as a performer in nightclubs, where she attracted the attention of celebrities, leading to a record contract.
She became one of the few Black women record producers in the industry in the 1970s, producing under the name of the glamorous “concert artiste” alter ego she’d imagine as a child, Rubina Flake.
“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,” NPR music critic Ann Flake wrote.
The memory of those indignities — and the opportunity that green piano represented — drove her to create opportunities for children in underserved communities. She created the Roberta Flack School of Music, which offered free music instruction to students in The Bronx, New York. Her Roberta Flack Foundation supports initiatives like Shelectricity, a tech community that empowers young girls and women, and the International Peace and Art Center, which uses the arts to explore social justice issues.
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, robbed Flack of her voice in her later years, but she never stopped helping others to find theirs.
“Find your own ‘green piano,’ ” she wrote, “and practice relentlessly until you find your voice, and a way to put that beautiful music into the world.”
Marc H. Morial is president and CEO of the National Urban League and was mayor of New Orleans from 1994 to 2002. He writes a twice-monthly column for the Sun-Times.
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