Even Robert Christgau couldn't get it right all the time. The self-professed "dean of American rock critics" sniffed at Roberta Flack's Quiet Fire in 1971 thusly: "Flack is generally regarded as the most significant new black woman singer since Aretha Franklin, and at moments she sounds kind, intelligent, and very likable. But she often exhibits the gratuitous gentility you'd expect of someone who says 'between you and I.'"

At this juncture, Flack was three albums into a tenure with Atlantic Records and only about to reach sensational heights in her storied career. Her take on a folk song by Ewan MacColl, "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face," was about to be rescued from the second side of debut album First Take (1969) when director Clint Eastwood used it to terrific effect in his directorial debut Play Misty for Me. Released as a single in the spring of '72, it soared to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 and took home a Grammy for Record of the Year. Flack's next trick was unprecedented: 1973's Grammy Award for Record of the Year went to another Flack track: her interpretation of the Charles Fox-Norman Gimbel tune "Killing Me Softly with His Song," another chart-topping single. (The Record of the Year prize has since gone to one artist in two consecutive years twice: to U2 in 2001 and 2002, and Billie Eilish in 2020 and 2021.) Gentility or not, it was and is hard to argue Flack's absolute utility as an interpreter of song, whose vocal stylings offered an alternate path to success in soul and pop music. It is this we remember following the announcement of her passing today at the age of 88.

Flack was seemingly destined for greatness at an early age. At 15, she enrolled at Howard University on a full-ride scholarship, continuing the classical piano studies she began as a child in Arlington, Virginia until switching her major to voice and helping conduct the university choir. A planned graduate program was sidelined by the death of her father; she instead turned to teaching music and accompanying opera singers at dinner shows in the Washington, D.C. area. Her voice teacher suggested she'd have greater luck as a pop musician than a classical singer; not long after, Les McCann caught her act and agreed. What happened next was the stuff of legend: marathon sessions with producer Joel Dorn, running through a murderer's row of standards in less than half a day's time.

These sessions became the nucleus of First Take (and its 50th anniversary reissue) and set the template for what audiences came to expect (and revere) from Flack. what she lacked in the kind of gutsy grit possessed by her genre contemporaries, she instead delivered by way of an enveloping warmth and can't-turn-away interpretations. Smokey Robinson may have given quiet storm its name, but it was Flack who first put the weather systems on our radars. She'd prove the perfect duet partner for an Atlantic Records labelmate and upstart named Donny Hathaway, cutting a hit album in 1972 that featured the Top 5 smash "Where is the Love," which joined "First Time" and "Killing Me Softly" in going gold. So too did the chart-topping "Feel Like Makin' Love" and the No. 2 Hathaway duet "The Closer I Get to You."

During this period, Flack learned to make music her way, making room for herself to grow in the process. She knew fame could be fickle. "All of a sudden you get that rush of 20,000, 30,000, 50,000 people--THE WORLD," she told Time in 1975. "All these people love me, you think. Then you're back in a hotel room by yourself in Missouri, your stomach hurts, and your humanness just overwhelms you." That humanness was on full display on 1975's Feel Like Makin' Love, her first LP without Joel Dorn in the producer's chair; he was replaced by Flack herself, under the name "Rubina Flake." Flack was less visible in the '80s - hits like the Peabo Bryson duet "Tonight I Celebrate My Love" and the Maxi Priest team-up "Set the Night to Music" notwithstanding - but it would soon become clear that her real presence in the years to come was as an influencer to new generations of female soul singers, from Erykah Badu and Lauryn Hill (whose cover of "Killing Me Softly" with the Fugees became one of the major musical touchstones of the late '90s) to SZA and Tinashe. (Consider Ann Powers' mighty 2020 essay on flack for NPR.)

Perhaps Christgau's MOR placement of Flack never had any basis in reality - a critical misreading of a woman who'd been a guest on Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue and whose last album, 2013's Let It Be Roberta, recast The Beatles in her own vision. (Flack was next-door neighbors to John Lennon and Yoko Ono at The Dakota.) The real story, I am almost certain, will be written by a new generation who'll recount the first time ever they heard her voice, believe in its timbre and power, and surrender to the feelings it will elicit.