“I’ve been advised I sound like Nina Simone, Nancy Wilson, Odetta, Barbra Streisand, Dionne Warwick, even Mahalia Jackson,” Ms. Flack advised The New York Occasions in 1970. “If all people mentioned I appeared like one individual, I’d fear. However once they say I sound like all of them, I do know I’ve acquired my very own type.”
Preternaturally gifted and bookish, Ms. Flack entered faculty at 15 and graduated whereas nonetheless a young person. However her musical profession blossomed slowly; by the point she discovered the highlight, she was properly into her 30s and had solely just lately stop educating junior highschool.
At a small Capitol Hill membership referred to as Mr. Henry’s, she had spent years creating an eclectic repertoire of about 600 songs and a riveting, unpretentious stage presence. Even when her fame exploded and her magnificence shone on the worldwide stage, Ms. Flack by no means turned bigger than life or shed the persona of an earnest, wise-beyond-her-years schoolteacher.
A virtuoso classical pianist who typically sang from the piano bench, Ms. Flack described her method as one thing like disrobing earlier than the viewers. “I need all people to see me as I’m,” she advised The Nationwide Observer in 1970. “Your voice cracks? OK, darlin’, you go proper on and maintain giving it what you’ve acquired left, and the viewers ignores it and goes proper together with you. I’ve discovered the best way to get myself by means of to individuals is simply to unzip myself and let all the things hang around.”
Ms. Flack belonged to a broad and persevering with custom of singer-pianists — Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, Alicia Keys — whose music is equally rooted within the blues, the Black church and Western classical music, and who’ve constantly challenged the strictures imposed by industrial style.
She noticed no want to decide on between a broad, accessible repertoire and a proud Afrocentrism, steeped in each Sixties radicalism and her personal spiritual upbringing. Because the scholar Jason King wrote, “Maybe no different mainstream musical artist of the Nineteen Seventies extra complexly introduced Black nationalism into discourse with European classical aesthetics.”
