Lady with a Low Flame

After coaching his student for three years, Voice Teacher Frederick Wilkerson took a deep breath and gave her his verdict: as a classical artist, she would make a good pop performer. Many young singers would have been demolished. Not Roberta Flack. Always fascinated with pop music, she took the advice, began lightening and loosening her Puccini-style soprano, soon was singing and playing piano for $20 a night at Mr. Henry's, a jazz joint in the Capitol Hill district of Washington, D.C. Her toughest adjustment was to the audiences, who were literally a far cry from politely attentive classical listeners. "Can we have a little quiet at Table Five, please?" Roberta would call out hopefully. Sometimes she would flee to her dressing room, vowing tearfully not to return to the bandstand until the clatter subsided. "I'd tell her to go on back out," recalls Wilkerson. " 'Some day they'll listen,' I'd say."

Today they are. In the past few weeks, Roberta's Atlantic recording of The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face has been the bestselling single in the country, and the album containing that song, First Take, has been the No. 1 LP. Roberta has also become a top concert attraction. Warbling her way thoughtfully through the soul classic Ain't No Mountain High Enough or Bob Dylan's Just Like a Woman, her head thrown straight back or tilted lazily to one shoulder, she can be sedate enough to appear with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops--as she did two weeks ago. Or she can burst with the full flavor of Southern blues, as in Eugene McDaniels' Reverend Lee, which she introduced recently to a Denver audience thus: "Lemme paint this picture clearly. This is about a big, strong, black, sexy [pause], potbellied, Southern Baptist minister, who like all men had a master plan for the ladies."

Emotional Secret. Roberta is a balladeer who blends jazz, pop and the blues in a way that recalls Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae and Nina Simone. She appeals to the Sinatra set as much as the jazz buffs, to the over-40s as much as their rock-bopping offspring. Her secret is that emotionally, she banks her fires. She knows that a low flame burns longer and more intriguingly than a high blaze. Thanks to her training, her voice retains a classical elegance, avoiding the frenzied bleating that characterizes so much pop singing today.

"Everything I've ever done has been with just one idea," says Roberta. "Whatever it was, I told myself, 'This is it.' " She took everything slow and steady, step by step. While she was growing up in Arlington, Va., her father worked as a draftsman and her mother as a public school cook who played organ at a local church. By the time she was nine, Roberta was playing for the Sunday school; at age eleven she was sitting in for Mom at the 11 o'clock service. She entered Howard University on a partial music scholarship at 15, and at 20 was teaching music in Washington junior high schools. After school she would rush home for a nap, then play at Mr. Henry's Georgetown branch until 2 a.m.

Slow Boil. Now 33 and divorced from a white bass player, Roberta lives in a fashionable part of suburban Alexandria, Va., with her mother, a full-time maid, four dogs, seven cats, one piano and one swimming pool, and worries about keeping her music heavy and her figure light. She also runs the Washington-based Roberta Flack Enterprises, which includes a publishing linn, a talent agency and a production company.

Appropriately, the hit that started it all is not Roberta's latest recording. First Take, in fact, was just that: her first LP, cut three years ago. It came and went, as did two subsequent albums. Then last year Actor Clint Eastwood was looking for a signature song to use in his movie about a disk jockey, Play Misty for Me. He hit upon The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face. Eventually, many of the disk jockeys who had seen the movie began playing the record on their shows. Moral: even a low flame finally brings things to a boil.

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