Grammy award-winning singer-songwriter Roberta Flack suffered a stroke in 2016 and contracted a mild form of COVID-19 in January. However, People Magazine reported that the 85-year-old plans to return to the stage despite her health issues.
“The pandemic has kept most of us off the stage for two years,” says Flack, 85, who is still working on regaining her strength following the stroke. “I don’t know what the next two years will hold, but I hope to see my fans in person sometime soon.”
Flack hasn’t performed onstage since her duet with Valarie Simpson at the Lincoln Center in 2017. The following year, she was rushed to the hospital after falling ill at the Apollo Theater. She was set to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Jazz Foundation of America.
Despite her setbacks, Flack has a couple of projects she is working on to remain busy. She told the outlet that she is looking forward to an upcoming documentary about her life and career. “I’m playing myself,” Flack jokingly said. Next year, she plans to release a children’s book based on her very first piano, which her father rescued from a local junkyard.
“He painted it green, and it smelled bad, but I played and practiced for untold hours on that piano,” she remembers. “It gave me wings of music that, as a 9-year-old girl, I needed so badly. I’ve been knocked down so many times, but I kept trying. Keep trying.”
As a former schoolteacher from Black Mountains, North Carolina, Flack’s music career began at age 35 when she released her first top-charting single, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” English singer-songwriter Ewan MacColl originally wrote the 1972 classical ballad for his wife, Peggy Seeger. Since then, it has been a go-to wedding song for decades. But, surprisingly, Flack’s powerful vocals on the track weren’t inspired by love and romance — it was seemingly about death.
“Through the years, I’ve sung that song thousands of times, and it has taken on different stories in my life, [but] honestly, at the time it was recorded, I sang it about my cat who had just died,” Flack recalls. “I loved that cat so much. That’s the story I was telling in the recording.”
While Flack earned two Grammy awards (record and song of the year) for her memorable performance on the single, it reached No. 1 on the Billboard charts in 1972, and the song’s 50th anniversary is on Mar. 7. Though music is her passion, she found other causes that were equally important to her. “I’m a lifelong advocate for music education for all children and for animal welfare,” said Flack. The music legend went on to record several top hits, including 1973’s “Killing Me Softly with His Song” and 1978’s “The Closer I Get to You.” “At the time I recorded ‘First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,’ I dug deep for the story I would tell when I sang the song.”
After turning 85 on Feb. 10, Flack celebrated the digital re-release of her soundtrack album for the 1982 Richard Pryor film Bustin’ Loose after being out of print for decades. The film’s 40th anniversary of its release is on Jun. 5, per People Magazine.
“This is one of the most personally meaningful collections of music that I’ve recorded in my career,” Flack said of the project, which she co-produced. “I loved the story of the movie that children living in challenging situations found people who believed in them and helped them to find a better life. My heart and soul is in this music, as I wrote and co-wrote six out of the nine tracks. Each track is deeply personal to me and touches on many different aspects of my life.”
Flack accounts her most significant accomplishment was co-producing the project since Black women weren’t afforded those opportunities during that time.
“It was, and to some degree, still is a rare thing for a Black female artist to be asked to produce anything for a major film or a major label,” she continues. “The glass ceiling that existed then, and let’s face it, still exists now, is gradually being pushed through, but it is a very real challenge for women of any color — especially for women of color.”
