• October 09, 1978
• Vol. 10
• No. 15

After Three Years on Tilt, Roberta Flack Is Finally Lighting Up the Charts Again

By Joy Wansley

Back in 1975 Roberta Flack was just about the most gloriously versatile voice in the business. She had wrapped her shiveringly emotive, operatic-quality soprano around jazz, blues, soul, pop and gospel on the way to five gold albums and four Grammys in six years. Critics rapturously compared her to Leontyne Price and Billie Holiday. Movie producers pressed her about playing Bessie Smith. But then Flack, who is at least as headstrong as she is intelligent, fell silent. For three years she released no records at all and all but dropped off the concert circuit. One problem was medical—she was plagued by recurring tonsillitis but refused surgery that could have altered her voice. Then last March Flack was smacked with an IRS bill for nearly $1 million in disallowed deductions.

"It was a bad time," says Roberta, who finds it as irksome to discuss the interval as her age (39). But, she adds, "I kept working." Her determination paid off this year—with a vengeance. Her first album since 1975, Blue Lights in the Basement, went gold and made the Pop Top 10. Then a single, The Closer I Get to You, shot all the way to No. 2. Meanwhile her version of Joe Brooks' sound-track ballad If Ever I See You Again topped the easy-listening charts. Now she's following up with the just-released Roberta Flack LP in which her seductive style has never sounded better. This year the IRS may need a field force just to audit Flack's royalties.

Roberta nurtured her talent in Arlington, Va., where her family had moved from rural Black Mountain, N.C. Her father, a Veterans Administration draftsman, financed classical piano lessons, and at 13 Roberta played Handel's Messiah for her church choir and mastered a Scarlatti sonata for a statewide music competition. At Stevens Elementary School in Washington (which Amy Carter attended last year) and public high school, Roberta skipped several grades and won a full musical scholarship to Howard University at 15. But when she was 19 her father died and she was forced to drop out of graduate work to teach English in a segregated school in Farmville, N.C. at $2,800 a year. Returning to Washington, she taught for six years in junior high schools while moonlighting as an accompanist and finally a headliner at Mr. Henry's, a Capitol Hill boite. Her local fame grew and in 1969 Flack released her debut album, First Take, which contained the hit The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face. Her career took off when the song was used as the theme for the 1971 Clint Eastwood movie Play Misty for Me.

Now Flack leads a life of passionate privacy in the Dakota, the West Side Manhattan address she shares with John Lennon and Lauren Bacall, among others. Her marriage to white bassist Steve Novosel ended in divorce in 1972 after seven years. Her current man is Stewart Bosley, a TV and film producer with whom she has "a commitment based on feelings, spending time together and making each other happy." Are they married? "Sometimes," she sidesteps. Bosley has three children from an earlier marriage, and Roberta says she's "trying to have a baby, but I have had trouble in the past with miscarriages." Between concerts and benefits (she's sung for everyone from Martin Luther King Jr. to Rubin "Hurricane" Carter), Roberta has begun work on a Ph.D. in education at the University of Massachusetts, where friends Bill Cosby and Quincy Jones studied. "I love teaching," she says. Maybe the title Roberta Flack really aspires to is not Queen but Doctor of Soul.