It was Les McCann, a star of the soul-jazz movement, who was so taken with her in 1968 that he taped one of her shows – a tempo-less version of the supper-club standard “All The Way” from that set leads off the second CD in this package – and then, having taken on the role of manager, arranged an audition with Joel Dorn, a bright young A&R man and producer at Atlantic Records.ĭorn, who died in 2007, aged 65, had big ears and a gift for identifying and accentuating the most interesting characteristics of talented artists. Jobs accompanying singers in clubs honed her versatility and led eventually to her own residency at Mr Henry’s, a popular hangout for visiting celebrities. Born in Black Mountain, North Carolina, in 1937, she had been brought up in Washington DC, where she attended Howard University. If that is a testament to Flack’s own inherent qualities, perhaps it also has something to do with the fact that she was into her thirties when she recorded it, with years of studying, teaching and performing music behind her. Now reissued in a slightly belated but nonetheless welcome 50th-anniversary deluxe edition, First Take is an opening statement of remarkable vision, authority and maturity. True enough, after her first British concert at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1972 she told an interviewer – James Johnson of the NME – that “one day I’d like to come back and conduct the London Symphony Orchestra” she never did, but there were no signs of emulating Simone’s unshakeable bitterness over the career she did not have. The difference – a big one, rooted in temperament – came in Flack’s ability to accept and enjoy her status in popular music. Like Flack, Nina Simone had studied classical piano and composition before her performances as a nightclub entertainer became the stepping stone to fame. She was her own woman from the start, and that made her harder to figure out.Īs time passed it became clear that there was only one of her near-contemporaries with whom she could plausibly be compared. And she was certainly not the willing mouthpiece, as Dionne Warwick and Diana Ross had become, of a team of pop svengalis. She lacked the raw blues spirit that suffused the voices of Tina Turner or Etta James. Unlike Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight or Mavis Staples, there seemed to be no obvious church-raised fire in her delivery. The quiet hum of appreciation that greeted Roberta Flack’s debut album in the summer of 1969 reflected the difficulty experienced by many critics of placing her on the spectrum of black female singers at the turn of the decade.