Flack History

 

Roberta Flack - Sunday & Sister Jones (OGWT 1973)


You hate to have to write these memorials, but you can't thrash and wail with inassuageable grief too much when someone lives to be 88 years old, after a lifetime no one here will forget maybe ever, can you?
OK, maybe you can... but they're still gonna be as dead as we all are eventually gonna be, and you'll be all out of Kleenex and Häagen-Dazs.
So while we can't sit, shivering (gosh these puns are grounds for homicide in their own right, aren't they?) and pining for the departed, we can be somewhat solemn in remembrance of the beloved deceased.
At least until we get a hold of the sangria stash at the reception after the burial, at any rate.

What is there to say about an artist such as Roberta Flack anyway, what BS could I possibly put here that would add to the conversation that started when she first took over the world 50+ years ago?

She didn't explode and have Johnny Carson crawling around on the floor of the Tonight Show studio right away, you know. It took a couple of years from when Les McCann, who essentially discovered her, first broke her out nationwide from Washington D.C. and her first couple of LPs registered.
It really all came down to Clint Eastwood... it always does, somehow, doesn't it? Do you feel lucky?

It was when he luckily insisted that 1) she allow her version of Ewan MacColl's The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, which had been released as a single some time before and failed to chart, to be used in his acclaimed directorial debut, Play Misty for Me and, 2) she not re-record it at a faster tempo and in a "rock"-ier arrangement for the film, as she told him she wanted to do when he suggested the song. For contrast, see the version recorded for Top of the Pops at Christmas of 1972 below.

Once it was seen on the big screen, the song and her career went through the roof faster than SpaceX debris from yet another failed launch, crashing into your house in the middle of a bathroom break. Just in the other, more ascending direction.

When she followed that breakthrough with what a whole lot of people contend is the greatest song ever recorded by anyone -- you know, the one where Don McLean strums Lori Lieberman's fate with his fingers, and sings her life with his words, in some sort of songwriters' unspoken, mutually psychic tête-à-tête for the ages -- she ascended to iconhood immediately and stayed there, like royalty, until a few weeks ago when she finally left us.

So many magical songs followed that advent, with solo gems and of course the many duets with galactic luminaries like Donny Hathaway and Peabo Bryson blowing up the Billboard Hot 100 and R&B pages like a neverending fireworks display of absolute, visionary artistry.

It's no kind of hyperbole to suggest that any singer-songwriters now and in the future will not be able to avoid driving on the roads Roberta Flack paved with her almost effortless, otherworldly mastery.

All right, this is a celebration of life, so enough solemnity tears and words of performative, faux gravitas from my pedantically small corner... it's time to get into the sounds, which is what moves the air the right way and what we're here for. And since I strive more and more to make creative stuff and not just post the most common bootlegs verbatim like on any other page, I guarantee it's gonna be firmly in the Not Sold In Stores category.

Roberta Flack
Flack History: Screen Gems
1970-73

01 Angelitos Negros (Boboquivari 1970)
02 Save the Country (Boboquivari 1970)
03 Ballad of the Sad Young Men (Boboquivari 1970)
04 Reverend Lee (Boboquivari 1970)
05 Let It Be (Boboquivari 1970)
06 Do What You Gotta Do (Montreux 1971)
07 Freedom Song (Mike Douglas 1972)
08 Mister Magic (Flip Wilson 1972)
09 Let It Be Me (Flip Wilson 1972)
10 Suzanne (Flip Wilson 1972)
11 Never Dreamed You'd Leave In Summer (Old Grey Whistle Test 1973)
12 Sunday & Sister Jones (Old Grey Whistle Test 1973)
13 Killing Me Softly (Johnny Carson 1973)
14 Just Like a Woman (Johnny Carson 1973)
15 The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face (Top of the Pops 1972)
16 Gone Away (Soul to Soul 1971)

Total time: 1:17:19

audio extracted from assorted early 1970s film & television appearances
assembled from the best available sources, edited, repaired & remastered by EN, March 2025
418 MB FLAC/direct link

So yeah, the vocals are little hot at times... the mics they were using back then for TV were largely unable to handle vocals of Roberta's power and range, with the one the poor, underfunded public TV techies used for the Boboquivari PBS segment probably having to be melted down for scrap after the performance. But despite the occasionally less-than-perfect sonics, I put this thing together and made some pretty Houdini-caliber repairs if I do say so, and the result is 77+ minutes of near-total ecstasy courtesy of one of our epoch's greatest Maestros.

That's right, a CD's worth of (mostly) television appearances -- all meticulously remastered individually by me -- and with all live vocals and almost all live accompaniment (no lip synch, mostly live bands), showcasing this sublime superstar's initial climb to the top at the turbulent dawn of the Seven Tease.

That will do it for this month from me, unless I get stir crazy and can't resist doing more. Truth be told, I'm already working on April... come she will and I wanna be ready. But before we close out the March to springtime, I wanted to share this tribute full of screen gems in memory of the divine Roberta Flack, whom I'm obviously not alone in saying is surely one of my favorite music people of all time, bar none.--J.

2.10.1937 - 2.24.2025
painters, why do you always paint White virgins?
Don't you know there are beautiful Black angels
in Heaven also?