I’m not sure she’s really a soul singer in the same category as Aretha Franklin or Gladys Knight; then again, nor is Diana Ross. One music source describes Flack as “classy, urbane, reserved, smooth, and sophisticated” which covers it pretty well without resorting to any genre label.

 

This song, written by Stevie Wonder – that’s him, submerged in the mix, rapping gently in the middle, as well as playing drums and keyboards – comes from what was intended as her second album of duets with Donny Hathaway.

 

Sadly it ended up as a solo album because Hathaway took his own life after recording only two songs for it. And this song – without Hathaway but with Stevie Wonder rapping quietly in the background – is the highlight for me.

 

In fact, with its bubbling bassline by Nathan Watts, it’s my favourite Flack recording, along with a saucy ode to a hot priest called Reverend Lee. And that bassline propelled a 12-inch disco mix that took easy-listening Roberta into the clubs for the first time.

 

Like most others, I first heard her hauntingly beautiful voice in 1972 when The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face was used by Clint Eastwood to soundtrack a passionate scene in his film Play Misty For Me.

 

What I didn’t know then was that Flack, who was already 34, had actually recorded it three years earlier, on her debut album First Take, and that it was a folk song, written by Ewan MacColl for Peggy Seeger way back in 1957.

 

It was such a huge hit for Flack that it not only topped charts all over the world but won her a Grammy for Record of the Year; a feat she repeated the following year with the equally memorable Killing Me Softly With His Song.

 

A Southern gal, Roberta took up the piano when she was nine and started playing hymns and spirituals with her local church choir. At 15 she won a scholarship to study classical piano at Howard University in Washington DC – one of the youngest students to enrol there.

 

Switching her studies from piano to voice, she became an assistant conductor of the university choir but, after her father died, instead of pursuing a career as a professional musician she taught piano in high school and gave private piano lessons out of her home in DC.

 

On evenings and weekends she would moonlight by backing opera singers at the piano in local clubs, and during intermissions she would sing blues, folk, and pop standards in a back room, accompanying herself on the piano.

 

After being discovered singing and playing jazz in a DC restaurant, she was signed to Atlantic Records and recorded her first album, though its light jazz-folk style performed poorly prior to Eastwood’s movie, which belatedly kickstarted her career.

 

Killing Me Softly went on to top the charts and sell more than two million copies, followed over the next two years by two more romantic ballads – The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face and Feel Like Makin’ Love.

 

She also began recording duets with Donny Hathaway, her old uni classmate from Howard, and they had million-selling hit singles together with Where Is The Love and The Closer I Get To You.

 

After Hathaway’s death she found a new duet partner in Peabo Bryson, enjoying another big hit with Tonight, I Celebrate My Love in 1982.

 

Her final album was a collection of Beatles covers – Let It Be Roberta – inspired by her friendship with the couple who were her next-door neighbours in the Dakota apartment building in New York (Lennon called her “Aunt Roberta”).

 

And in 2018, at the age of 80, she recorded a song called Running for the closing credits of a documentary, 3100: Run And Become.

 

* Pop trivia fact: in 1987 Flack supplied the voice of Michael Jackson’s mother in the famous 18-minute short film for Bad.

 

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