Episodes
Killing Me Softly: The Roberta Flack Story (BBC Four Friday 10 June 2022)
The Grammy Award-winning song The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face by Roberta Flack was the best-selling single in America in 1972. When Killing Me Softly with His Song reached the top of the charts and won another Grammy for single of the year the following year, her gentle, pure voice enchanted middle America once more. Roberta Flack was one of the most popular pop stars in the world in the early 1970s.
But Flack was no overnight sensation. She didn’t have a hit single till she was 35 years of age. Nor was her success a traditional African-American rags-to-riches story. She came from the black middle class that had been born out of the self-contained hub of segregated America. She studied classical music at Howard University, America’s top black university, and probably would have pursued a classical career had that door been open to her in 50s America. Instead, she taught music in Washington’s public school system for 10 years while she struggled for her break.
In those race-conscious times, she also had her detractors. While she was singing duets of black consciousness with soul singer Donnie Hathaway, she was married to her white bass player. Also, they said she sounded too white; the gospel-infused voices of Aretha Franklin and James Brown, which came out of the dominant Baptist church, were what real soul singers sounded like. What those critics didn’t understand was that there are many musical traditions within black America and Roberta Flack came from the more restrained Methodist one where they sang hymns rather than gospel.
This is the story of the emergence of a different kind of soul singer, set against the turbulent backdrop of America’s Civil Rights movement. Contributors include Roberta Flack, Dionne Warwick, Johnny Mathis, Cissy Houston, Imani Perry, professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, musician and critic Greg Tate, musicologist Fredera Hadley and film-maker and critic John Akomfrah.
Airdate: Friday 10 June 2022 at 9.00pm on BBC Four.
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