In the liner notes to 2023’s Lost Takes – which excavated the tapes that had served as Roberta Flack’s audition for Atlantic Records over half a century earlier – the poet Harmony Holiday wrote that Flack possessed “the voice of the idyllic afterlife you’d want to arrive in after the end of a dysfunctional world”.
Indeed, Flack sang like she was equally conversant with the ecstasy of faith and the agony of life. The dignified richness of her vocal was tempered by the subtly volcanic power she displayed on her reading of To Sir With Love off Lost Takes – a not-so-quiet fire that always resided within her.
