Roberta Flack: A Timeless Voice and an Overlooked Masterpiece
(February 28, 2025). Earlier this week, the world lost one of its most elegant and evocative voices with the passing of Roberta Flack (Feb. 24). A classically trained pianist and former schoolteacher, Flack possessed a voice so smooth and intimate that it felt as though she were singing directly to the listener.
Many of this week’s tributes acknowledged her undeniable mark in music by focusing on her early 1970s work and her ability to fuse soul, jazz, and folk into a sound that was uniquely hers. That talent earned her three No. 1 pop hits with “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” and “Feel Like Makin’ Love” — a trilogy that made her the first woman in pop history to earn Hot 100 No. 1s in three consecutive years (from 1972-74). “The First Time” also became the first song to finish as the year’s biggest hit three years after its original release. It topped 1972’s year-end chart after first being included on Flack’s 1969 debut album, First Take, only gaining attention after Clint Eastwood featured it in his directorial debut psycho-thriller film, Play Misty for Me.
For what it’s worth, Roberta’s First Take is largely considered her best album — both critically and commercially. It was her only LP to top the Billboard charts and contained arguably her most soulful vocals in interpretations of regular writing partner Gene McDaniel’s protest song “Compared to What,” the Spanish folk tune “Angelico’s Negros,” the rousing gospel hymn “I Told Jesus,” and, of course, “First Time.”
But, despite their iconic status, First Take and the immediate hits that followed don’t tell Flack’s whole musical story, nor do they fully illustrate Flack’s versatility in what was an ever changing landscape.
To probe this further, Flack was not always the critics’ darling. For every praise there seemed to be a criticism. Where one review lauded her ballads and her ability to elongate phrases and blend styles that few other Black musicians had even dared to previously, others laid bets on who would fall asleep first — Flack or her listeners — when hearing her earlier albums (particularly her second one, Chapter Two… the stellar opening track “Reverend Lee” excepted).
But Flack was an artist willing to evolve beyond the simmering ballads that brought her into America’s consciousness, as evidenced by what this blogger considers her most ambitious album since First Take: the 1980 LP Roberta Flack…Featuring Donny Hathaway.
Inspired by the smash success of “The Closer I Get To You,” a No. 1 soul and No. 2 pop hit in 1978, the 1980 project was intended as her second full-length duet album with Hathaway following their 1972 million-seller Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway (which included their other No. 1 soul/ top five pop duet, “Where Is The Love”). Their project was tragically altered when Hathaway died on January 13, 1979 — reportedly the same day he had completed two new recordings. Those tracks, “Back Together Again” and “You Are My Heaven” (co-written by Stevie Wonder), would go on to become big R&B hits, providing a bittersweet farewell to the legendary Flack/Hathaway partnership. The sudden turn of events would force Flack to complete the remainder of the album as a solo act.
But it was the finished product that would be perhaps Flack’s most daring — one in which, for the first time in her career, the uptempo tunes outnumbered the ballads. It was as if Hathaway’s transition was allowing Flack to experience her own, musically speaking. The new album was her own revival.
Of the album’s seven tracks, four were uptempo dance numbers — or at least mid-to-uptempo — including the two aforementioned Hathaway singles plus “God Don’t Like Ugly” (written by the late Gwen Guthrie) and the stellar Stevie Wonder composition “Don’t Make Me Wait Too Long.” “You Are My Heaven” and “Back Together Again” — released consecutively — became the first back-to-back Flack singles with a backbeat to reach the soul top ten (and, for that matter, the Hot 100).
It was a bold sonic shift for Flack for several reasons. It was her first real nod to disco, with the tracks “Back Together Again” and “Don’t Make Me Wait” being given joint 12” single treatment and clocking at a combined running time of nearly 18 minutes in their original album lengths. In a joint chart entry, both songs gave Flack her only top-10 listing on Billboard’s Top Disco chart in the spring of 1980.
That Flack had gone down disco’s thorny path was surprising both in its sonic direction and its timing. Thanks to the genre being exploited — often horribly — by labels churning out one disco blunder after another by the likes of artists as far-fetched as Ethyl Merman and Donny & Marie Osmond in the post-Saturday Night Fever late 1970s, disco was quickly falling out of favor by the time Flack released Featuring Donny Hathaway in March 1980.
The (late) timing of the release was largely due to Hathaway’s passing in the album’s early recording stages. His death in January 1979 came during disco’s peak, as he and Flack attempted with disco what they’d seen artists as wide-ranging as The Rolling Stones and Frankie Valli pull off so successfully only months earlier. It’s arguable that the ironically titled (given the circumstances) “Back Together Again” would’ve been an even bigger pop hit than its No. 56 Hot 100 peak suggested had it been released a year earlier. The same could be said of first single “You Are My Heaven” (No. 47 Hot 100).
But the song that was the album’s most daring, and arguably its best IMHO, was “Don’t Make Me Wait Too Long” — itself funky in a Roberta Flack kinda way. That tune, which portrays Flack as the victim of a one-night stand, had Stevie Wonder’s fingerprints all over it: a driving percussion, a distinctive but ominous melody with minor-chord progressions, Stevie’s unique turn-of-sentence phrasing, and the two pop-soul icons even pulling off a sexy whispered rap during the song’s bridge. Stevie played most of the instruments on this classic, which he had recorded for himself as an unreleased track around the time he was making the Hotter Than July album.
Despite its funk flourishes, Featuring Donny Hathaway was a true Roberta Flack album that handled the disco detour with an elegance and sophistication that only she could achieve. The album saw Flack embracing disco — not in its glitzy, high-energy form, but with a refined, soulful touch. No one listening could accuse the “You’ve Got a Friend” singer of sacrificing her classic style. Her vocals on the uptempo tracks were as smooth as silk, almost indistinguishable from the way she delivered them on all the ballads. Despite their lack of success on the Hot 100, the album’s three singles — “You Are My Heaven,” “Back Together Again,” and “Don’t Make Me Wait” — propelled the album to gold certification, something her prior album failed to accomplish.
Of course, contributing to this signature sound and success was the fact Roberta had a group of loyal musicians and songwriters involved in the album’s creation. Aside from Hathaway and Wonder — both of whom had written songs for Flack previously — there were Reggie Lucas, James Mtume, Gwen Guthrie, Gerry Goffin, Michael Masser, Stuart Scharf and Eric Mercury — all of whom had also worked with Flack previously. Sadly, all of them (with the exception of Stevie) preceded Flack in death.
Another regular Flack contributor, the late Luther Vandross, sang backup on “Back Together Again.” His distinctive voice can be heard with other background singers exclaiming “Got to be real” during the song’s post-chorus. It was a nod to another disco classic — Cheryl Lynn’s debut hit — which was topping the charts around the time “Together” was recorded in January 1979.
The album — with all its celestial references (“Only Heaven Can Wait,” “You Are My Heaven,” “God Don’t Like Ugly”) plus the closing ballad “Stay With Me” — may have begun as a memorial to Hathaway, whose sudden passing had to inspire lines like “if you know you’re gonna lose someone so beautiful the rest of your life, that’s an awful lot to miss” (from “Stay With Me”), and the even more poignant ballad, “Disguises,” which seems directly aimed at Hathaway with the closing line, “I will not forget you, I am sure because I tried.”
Now, with all of the other contributors’ passings, Featuring Donny Hathaway takes on even broader meaning — an unintentional memorial to the extraordinary circle of talent involved in making it.
While Flack continued to find success in the 1980s with hits like “Making Love” and “Tonight, I Celebrate My Love” (her duet with Peabo Bryson), plus the Maxi Priest duet “Set the Night to Music” in 1991, Roberta Flack…Featuring Donny Hathaway remains a pivotal, if overlooked, moment in her catalog. It was a project that pushed her into new musical territory, proved her ability to thrive under heartbreaking circumstances, and gave the world its final recordings by Donny Hathaway — a gift in itself.
Roberta Flack’s legacy is not just in her hits but in the way she made music feel personal. She sang with a rare intimacy, one that could soothe, inspire, and break hearts in equal measure. And while her greatest successes may have been her tender ballads, Roberta Flack…Featuring Donny Hathaway stands as a testament to her versatility, determination, and artistry.
This week, as we celebrate her life and music, we also remember this hidden gem — an album that, much like the woman behind it, deserves to be cherished for generations to come.
R.I.P. Roberta Cleopatra Flack (February 10, 1937 – February 24, 2025).
DJRob
DJRob (he/him) is a freelance music blogger from the East Coast who covers R&B, hip-hop, disco, pop, rock and country genres – plus lots of music news and current stuff! You can follow him on Bluesky at @djrobblog.bsky.social, X (formerly Twitter) at @djrobblog, on Facebook or on Meta’s Threads.
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