by Marc H. Morial,
<TriceEdneyWire.com> — “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 in 2020. 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” – Roberta Flack.
From the time she was a four-year-old girl in Black Mountain, N.C., Roberta Flack dreamed of having her own piano. But her parents couldn’t afford one.
When she was nine and her family was living in Arlington, Va., her father spied a beat-up old upright piano in a junkyard. He brought it home and painted it green.
That green piano (later immortalized in Flack’s children’s book, The Green Piano: How Little Me Found Music) launched the child prodigy into one of the most remarkable and influential careers in American music history.
Flack, who died this week at the age of 88, was perhaps best known for her chart-topping romantic ballads, ‘Killing Me Softly’ and ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.’ But her defiant performances addressing war, racism, sexism, LGBTQ rights, and other social issues led Rev. Jesse Jackson (whose Operation Breadbasket she supported) to call her “socially relevant and politically unafraid.”
The first track on her debut album, First Take, released at the height of the Vietnam War in 1969, was the protest ballad, ‘Compared To What?’ On that same album (recorded before the Stonewall Riots) she turned the campy musical theater number ‘Ballad of the Sad Young Men’ into a gay rights anthem.
“There is no way to fully emphasize the political risks Roberta Flack may have faced as an R&B singer in the late ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, performing and discussing songs advocating human rights for gay men and women,” music critic Eric Weisbard wrote.
She was one of many guest performers of the feminist children’s entertainment project Free to Be You and Me, performing ‘When We Grow Up’ with Michael Jackson on the 1974 ABC television special.
Her commitment to creating opportunities for children, especially Black girls, was rooted in her own challenges. When she had the opportunity to produce her own records (one of the first Black women ever to do so) she used the pseudonym ‘Rubina Flake,’ a glamorous ‘concert artiste’ alter ego she’d dreamed up during her childhood.
“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.
Even against those odds, she earned a full music scholarship to Howard University when she was just 15, graduating at 19. She later founded the Roberta Flack School of Music, to give students in The Bronx, New York, the opportunity to receive free music lessons.
She was a pioneer of the blend of jazz, blues, soul, and pop music that became known as the ‘Quiet Storm,’ but she continued to defy categorization until ALS, sometimes called ‘Lou Gehrig’s disease,’ cruelly robbed her of her voice in her last few years.
Her artistic, activist, and philanthropic legacy is endless, but best summed-up by her advice in Green Piano: “Find your own ‘green piano’ and practice relentlessly until you find your voice, and a way to put that beautiful music into the world.”
