One rainy day last month, Roberta Flack, the smooth voice of 1970s soul ballads, stepped out of her recording studio in Chelsea, hailed a yellow taxi and threw a suitcase of CDs into the back seat. Arriving at the Dakota, her longtime home, Ms. Flack got out and hurried past the wrought-iron entrance gate, seeking cover from the downpour.
Then: “Panic! Panic! Panic!” Ms. Flack recalled on the telephone the other day. “I left the suitcase in the cab!”
In an instant, Ms. Flack had joined the ranks of world-class musicians (most famously the cellist Yo-Yo Ma) forced to grapple with a quintessential nightmare of New York transit. More than a year’s worth of work, including much of a new compilation of Beatles covers — tentative title: “Let It Be Roberta” — had disappeared to points unknown.
“It was priceless,” Ms. Flack, 73, said a few weeks after the episode. (The trauma still sounded fresh.) “I’ve been working on this album for a while. I had packed all of the stuff that had been finished, stuff that had not been finished, things I was thinking of approaching, things I was not thinking of approaching ever.”
I can't believe she's 73! But I guess that makes sense, since she had her first hit in 1973:
Her duets with Donny Hathaway (who committed suicide in 1979) were magical. Here are Roberta and Donny singing "The Closer I Get to You" in 1978:
This song always gives me the chills. I'm sure John Lennon loved Roberta Flack's music; he and the other Beatles were huge fans of the 1950s and 1960s soul classics with which Roberta grew up. And she lives at the Dakota!
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