Roberta Flack, the church pianist behind the quiet storm

Roberta Flack learned piano sitting on her mother's lap, on a battered old instrument her father found for her. Born in 1937 in Black Mountain, North Carolina, to a jazz-pianist father and a church-organist mother, she was playing hymns and spirituals for church choirs in Arlington, Virginia, while still a child. At thirteen she took second place in a statewide competition for Black students with a Scarlatti sonata.

That performance won her a full scholarship to Howard University, though her parents made her wait until she was fifteen to start. She became one of its youngest students, switched her major from piano to voice, and worked as assistant conductor of the choir. At Howard she met Donny Hathaway, who would become her closest collaborator. After her father died suddenly she had to earn a living, taking a teaching job in Farmville, North Carolina, and later teaching in Washington, D.C. while giving private piano lessons at home.

The music happened on evenings and weekends. She accompanied opera singers at the Tivoli Theatre and, in the intermissions, sang blues, folk and pop standards in a back room. Her voice teacher told her that her future lay in pop rather than classical music, and she adjusted her repertoire. In 1968 she began singing professionally at Mr. Henry's Restaurant on Capitol Hill, and her reputation travelled from there.

What followed made her one of the defining voices of 1970s popular music. Her ballads blended R&B, jazz, folk and pop and helped give birth to the quiet storm radio format. “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”, “Killing Me Softly with His Song” and “Feel Like Makin' Love” all topped the Billboard Hot 100, and she became the first artist to win the Grammy for Record of the Year in consecutive years. Her duets with Hathaway, “Where Is the Love” and “The Closer I Get to You”, still sound intimate. She died in 2025, five years after receiving a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.