“She sang reveries as much as exclamations, and yet her stillness electrified the soul. In time, the style she created became known as ‘quiet storm.’ If she was unlike singers who came before her, there were many who would emulate her in her wake.”

This was one of many praiseworthy comments written about singer Roberta Flack over the past few days following her death February 24th at age 88.

Although her first LP came out back in 1969 and I’d been hearing her name for a couple of years, my initial impression of Flack didn’t come until early 1973 when she released the indelible single “Killing Me Softly With His Song.” It may have leaned a bit too much toward middle-of-the-road pop for my rock ‘n’ roll/blues tastes, but it nevertheless grabbed me, thanks to the compelling lyrics and her flawless vocal delivery. Mainstream listeners went wild for it, sending the song to #1 on the US pop charts and in Canada and Australia, and into the Top Ten in six other countries. The following March, Flack’s recording landed the coveted Record of the Year honors as well.

A native of Asheville, NC, Flack proved to be a piano prodigy, playing alongside the choir at her church and going on to earn a scholarship to study classical music at Howard University. For Flack, classical music was the foundation of her practice; even the music at the church her family attended was more Handel and Bach than the high-energy gospel found in Baptist churches. “For the first three decades of my life, I lived in the world of classical music,” Flack said. “There were these wonderful melodies and harmonies that were the vehicles through which I could express myself.”

David Nathan, soul music historian and author, wrote, “Roberta was a towering force as a musician and singer. One of her greatest gifts was her ability to find songs that really expressed emotion. When you listen to Roberta, you hear different elements of her classical training; her approach to a whole diversity of music that was unlike anyone else’s. Listen to some of her greatest recordings, and you hear singing and playing that’s measured and thoughtful, and still has all the emotion in it. She didn’t like it when people categorized her as either R&B, soul or pop. The truth is she was all of it.”

After graduating from Howard, she started a teaching career, and eventually began gigging in clubs in Washington, D.C. As the buzz around her grew, she was signed to Atlantic Records, which released her debut, “First Take,” in 1969. That album showed Flack interpreting an array of different songs, from the classic jazz/blues protest “Compared to What” to what is arguably the definitive version of Leonard Cohen’s sensitive “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.”

While “First Take” would eventually assume its rightful place as a widely recognized masterpiece, success was not immediate. The first few singles failed to chart, and Flack quickly moved on to her next records, releasing “Chapter Two” in 1970 and “Quiet Fire” in 1971. She also linked up with friend and fellow Howard University student Donny Hathaway for a duets album, with the pair earning minor hits with contemporary pop standards like “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'” and “You’ve Got a Friend.”

But Flack’s real breakthrough came when Clint Eastwood used her meditative version of British folksinger Ewan MacColl’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” — originally recorded for “First Take” — in “Play Misty For Me,” his 1971 thriller about a jazz radio DJ. The song shot to #1, with the album eventually reaching #1 as well in April 1972, nearly three years after its original release.

Flack’s version of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” would go on to win the Grammy for Record of the Year in 1973, and she and Hathaway won a Best Duo Pop Vocal Performance for “Where Is the Love” that year as well.

In the summer of 1972, Flack said she first heard “Killing Me Softly With His Song” on an airplane when the original version by the relatively unknown singer Lori Lieberman was featured on the in-flight audio program. “The title, of course, smacked me in the face,” Flack recalled in the 1990s. “I immediately pulled out some scratch paper, played the song at least eight to ten times jotting down the melody that I heard. When I landed, I immediately had my manager contact the songwriters. Two days later, I had the music, and recorded it shortly thereafter.”

(A bit of trivia: Most people probably aren’t aware that “his song” — the one that’s referred to in the title — is “Empty Chairs” by Don McLean, which Lieberman had heard the singer perform at a club in 1972. She was so moved by it that she grabbed a cocktail napkin and scribbled, “He’s killing me softly with this song.” She passed that along to her manager/producer duo, Norman Gimbel and Charles Fox, who fleshed it out into the completed piece.)

When it won Flack’s second consecutive Record of the Year Grammy, it was the only time an artist had won back-to-back Grammys in that important category (until U2 duplicated the feat in 2001-2002).

Also on the “Killing Me Softly” album was her rendition of Janis Ian’s song “Jesse,” which stalled at #30 on pop charts but reached #3 on the adult contemporary chart. Said Ian, “One day, I learned that Roberta had fallen in love with my demo of “Jesse” and wanted to record it. She said it was a no-brainer that she’d record it but it might take a while. I cannot begin to tell you what that meant to me. It was released on the heels ‘Killing Me Softly,’ and suddenly I was worthy of respect again. I owe her more than I can possibly say.”

Flack scored her third #1 single the following year with the sunny “Feel Like Makin’ Love.” With Hathaway again in 1978, she recorded the romantic ballad “The Closer I Get to You,” written by two of Miles Davis’s sidemen, James Mtume and Reggie Lucas, reaching #2 on pop charts.

While Flack helped pioneer the “quiet storm” genre, her versatility as a performer and interpreter incorporated elements of folk, rock, jazz, R&B, show tunes, and soul. “My music is inspired thought by thought, and feeling by feeling, not note by note,” she once said. “I tell my own story in each song as honestly as I can in the hope that each person can hear it and feel their own story within those feelings.”

Not every critic embraced Flack’s music. Notoriously prickly Village Voice critic Robert Christgau once wrote, “Flack has nothing whatsoever to do with rock and roll or rhythm and blues, and almost nothing to do with soul. Her middle-of-the-road aesthetic is like Barry Manilow but with better taste.”

But Rolling Stone writer Mikal Gilmore took a different view. “Her influence has never stopped reverberating. Flack was a woman who sang in a measured voice, but her measurements moved times and events as much as they moved hearts.” Critic Steve Huey called Flack’s music “classy, urbane, reserved, smooth, and sophisticated. She generated rapturous, spellbinding mood music that plumbed the depths of soulful heaviness by way of classically-informed technique.”

In the 1980s and 1990s, Flack’s chart successes began to wane but still included such notable tracks as “Tonight, I Celebrate My Love” with Peabo Bryson, 1988’s “Oasis” and 1991’s “Set the Night to Music. Flack released her last full-length record, “Let It Be Roberta” — a collection of her renditions of Beatles songs — in 2012. She was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2020. “It was overwhelming,” she said. “When I met those artists and so many others in person and heard from them that they were inspired by my music, I felt understood.”

Flack was also deeply involved in political movements of the post-Civil Rights era. She befriended Angela Davis and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and she sang at Bob Dylan’s 1975 benefit concert for boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, who’d been wrongfully convicted of murder. She was also a staunch supporter of gay rights, and was an active member of the Artist Empowerment Coalition, which advocates for artists to have the right to control their creative properties. Her involvement in ASPCA included an appearance in a commercial showing animal faces with “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” playing behind them

She lent her name and financial backing to The Hyde Leadership Charter School in the Bronx, which ran an after-school music program called “The Roberta Flack School of Music” to provide free music education to underprivileged students.

In 2022, Flack was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and lost her ability to sing. The disease, her rep said at the time, “has made it impossible to sing and not easy to speak.”

John Lennon’s son Sean publicly mourned the singer, pointing out that she lived for a while in The Dakota in Manhattan down the hall from their late father. “We’d call her Aunt Roberta,” said Sean. “She was a close family friend, incredibly kind and uniquely talented. I’m so grateful to have known her.”

Rest In Peace, Roberta.

*********************

The talented musicians, songwriters and entertainers of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s who inspired and influenced so many have been passing away with disconcerting regularity lately. These have included singers and instrumentalists whose contributions to key songs and/or albums from that era have made a significant impact on my musical preferences and those of younger artists who have followed in their footsteps. Such is the case with two notable deaths recently, both of whom I feel are worthy of a detailed look back.

*****************************

When the soul music genre is discussed, many people focus on high-profile acts at Motown Records like The Supremes, The Temptations, The Four Tops, Smokey Robinson and The Miracles, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder.

Just as influential, however, were the high-octane singers on Atlantic Records and its Memphis-based subsidiary, Stax Records: Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Ray Charles, Wilson Pickett, Solomon Burke… and Sam & Dave.

Like so many of the dynamic soul music practitioners who came of age in the ’60s and ’70s, Sam Moore and Dave Prater each began their singing careers in their Baptist church choirs — in Florida and Georgia, respectively — belting out gospel music. By the time they reached 30, the two men had teamed up to become one of the most popular soul music acts of their era.

Moore passed away January 10th following complications during surgery at age 89. Prater had died in an auto accident in 1988 at age 50.

The two had paid their dues in regional gospel groups in the 1950s, Moore with The Melionaires and Prater with The Sensational Hummingbirds, each pushing their respective groups to inject more secular elements into their gospel repertoires. They met at an R&B club in 1961 when they appeared on the same bill and decided to join forces and concentrate on soul tunes while using the irresistible “call and response” style of gospel to incite audiences.

Jerry Wexler, the iconic music producer and co-founder of Atlantic who first saw the duo perform in 1964, wrote in his 1993 autobiography “Rhythm and the Blues”: “I put Sam in the sweet tradition of Sam Cooke or Solomon Burke, while Dave had the ominous Four Tops’ Levi Stubbs-sounding voice, the preacher promising hellfire.” He and Atlantic co-founder Ahmet Ertegun signed Sam & Dave on the spot that night and put them on their Stax label to augment the work of Redding, Eddie Floyd and Booker T. and The MGs, among others.

While their voices meshed so effectively, their personalities didn’t, resulting in a rather tempestuous relationship during and after their relatively brief 1965-1969 heyday.

But what a heyday it was. Sam & Dave’s chart success began with “You Don’t Know Like I Know,” which reached #7 on R&B charts in late ’65, followed by their first pop chart appearance, the classic “Hold On I’m Comin’,” in early 1966, which peaked at #21 and went to #1 on R&B charts. Three more Top Ten R&B chart hits followed (“Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody,” “You Got Me Hummin'” and “When Something Is Wrong With My Baby”) before they came up with the one-two punch that iced their reputation with the mainstream public: “Soul Man” and “I Thank You.”

In particular, “Soul Man” captured the hearts and minds of many in the fall of ’67, becoming a must-play at every teen dance and R&B club across the country. With instrumental backing by Booker T. and The MGs, Stax Records’ house band, Sam & Dave reached #2 on pop charts, followed a couple months later by “I Thank You” at #9. Even the concurrent LP “Soul Men” managed to reach #62 on mainstream album charts. All of these tunes, by the way, were written and produced by the Stax songwriting/producing team of David Porter and Isaac Hayes (who later became a performing star in his own right).

Their chart appearances waned by 1970, but for those who saw Sam & Dave in concert, their reputation and legacy as a “frenetic and kinetic” live act is etched in stone. Known in the industry as “The Sultans of Sweat” and “Double Dynamite,” Sam & Dave ’s live shows were so powerful that even as charismatic a performer as Redding was hesitant to follow them on the bill for fear of being upstaged.

They broke up in 1970 and each attempted solo careers with little success, which precipitated more than one reunion tour that ended acrimoniously. “We were a duo but we weren’t a partnership,” wrote Moore in the 1998 book “Sam and Dave: An Oral History.” He conceded that his drug habit at the time played a part in their troubles and speculated that it made industry executives leery about giving them a second chance.

Although Moore never had another hit, a 1978 cover of “Soul Man” by John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd as The Blues Brothers (with guitarist Steve Cropper and other members of The MGs in the group) put Sam & Dave back in the limelight for a spell. However, Moore said it chafed at him a bit because he felt that “Saturday Night Live” audiences thought “Soul Man” originated with The Blues Brothers.

Additionally, Bruce Springsteen befriended Moore around that time and welcomed him on stage for occasional guest appearances over the years. Said Springsteen in the wake of Moore’s death, “Over on E Street, we are heartbroken to hear of the death of Sam Moore, one of America’s greatest soul voices. There simply isn’t another sound like Sam’s soulful tenor in American music. Having had the honor to work with Sam on several occasions, I can tell you that he was a sweet and funny man, filled with stories of the halcyon days of soul music. He had that edge of deep authenticity in his voice that I could only wonder at.”

E Street Band member Steve Van Zandt chimed in by saying, “Sam was one of the last of the great Soul Men. He and Dave Prater were the inspiration for me and Johnny Lyon to start Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes. He was an important, righteous, wonderful man.”

Sam & Dave were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992. Moore’s solo album “Plenty Good Lovin’,” which he recorded in 1970 but was never released, finally arrived to glowing reviews in 2002. He performed for presidents and recorded with not only Springsteen but also Lou Reed, Conway Twitty and others. He also worked to help secure other performers’ and songwriters’ long-overdue copyrights and royalties.

“It’s been a roller-coaster ride, but mostly a good one,” said his wife Joyce Moore in 2014. “The toughest part has been realizing how mistreated Sam and his peers were by managers and record labels. Many of them are gone and never got the credit or the money they deserved. Still, we’ve been blessed.”

**************************

He has been described as “a musical polymath,” “a virtuoso multi-instrumentalist” and “an avant-garde pianist in a 1915 grindhouse.” From piano and accordion to sax and violin, he could play them all with style and dexterity, sometimes simultaneously.

He was Garth Hudson, the oldest and last surviving member of the pioneering Americana/roots music group known simply as The Band. He died Tuesday, January 21, at age 87.

John Simon, one of the top record producers of the late ’60s who manned the boards for The Band’s iconic first two albums, had this to say about Hudson: “He was a wonderful, mad, brilliant genius, a wonderful guy who had so many gifts. He could play one melody with his left hand, another with his right hand, a wah-wah pedal with one foot, another thing with the other foot. And if you put something in his mouth he could play that too, all at the same time.”

Full confession: I have always respected The Band and what they accomplished, but I wouldn’t call myself a big fan. I saw them once in concert (1974) as part of a triple bill and bought only their debut album and a “Best Of” package after they’d disbanded. Once I got around to seeing their acclaimed concert film “The Last Waltz” many years after the fact, I began a comprehensive exploration of their catalog, and am very glad I finally did. There’s much to be enjoyed and admired.

The Band’s body of work — especially its first two LPs, 1968’s “Music From Big Pink” and 1969’s “The Band” — seemed wholly unique, going totally against the grain of both the pop mainstream as well as the psychedelic underground scene of that era. Hudson, guitarist Robbie Robertson, drummer Levon Helm, pianist Richard Manuel and bassist Rick Danko were indeed a band in the best sense of the word: five earnest, dedicated instrumentalists who also sang up a storm and eschewed individual virtuosity in deference to the musical whole. Their recorded legacy stands as a testament to their communal work ethic and their many years as a performing entity honing their craft before they found fame.

Hudson was born in Windsor, Ontario, to a mother who was a pianist and a father who played a variety of wind instruments. Hudson showed musical talent and an inventive nature at an early age, once disassembling and rebuilding his father’s old pump organ at age 10. He was playing accordion in a country band at age 12, and his parents sent him to the Toronto Conservatory, where he learned to play Bach preludes and Anglican hymns.

He soon developed a deep love of rock & roll and, as a member of The Capers, he played piano and sax, backing up touring stars like Johnny Cash and Bill Haley when they came to town. Rockabilly veteran Ronnie Hawkins recognized Hudson’s talent and invited him to join his backing band, The Hawks, but Hudson was hesitant until he was offered a new organ, extra money and the title “music consultant” so that his parents would feel better about their gifted son playing “mere rock ’n’ roll.”

Within The Hawks, Hudson made everyone sit up and take notice at his intricate swirls on the Lowrey organ (a departure from the Hammond B3 organ preferred by most rock keyboardists). And he could play almost anything — saxophone, accordion, synthesizers, trumpet, French horn, violin — and in a wide range of styles that could fit in comfortably in a conservatory, a church, a carnival or a roadhouse.

With Robertson’s songs, the spirited vocals of Helms, Manuel and Danko, and the inspired musicianship of Hudson, The Hawks soon outgrew the limited rockabilly genre and, in 1965, they hitched their wagon instead to Bob Dylan, who was in the process of evolving from an acoustic folk artist playing protest songs into a rock musician writing wondrous, expansive pieces. When Dylan toured in early 1966, the bill labeled them as “Bob Dylan and The Band,” and the simple name stuck.

“Like everyone who encounters Garth for the first time,” Helm wrote in his memoir, “Bob was blown away by his versatility and broad musical background. Robbie used to say that Garth could just as easily have played with John Coltrane or the New York Symphony Orchestra.”

When Dylan isolated himself in the rustic town of Woodstock, NY, after a motorcycle accident, The Band lodged themselves in a nearby modest pink house, where they worked long hours on more than 100 songs, for years available only as bootlegs, that later became known as “The Basement Tapes.” The music varied from old folk, country and Appalachian songs to such new compositions as “Tears of Rage,” “I Shall Be Released” and “This Wheel’s on Fire.” It was Hudson who set up and oversaw the capture of these sessions on surprisingly advanced home recording equipment.

Hudson found the area magical, and it would become the home base for much of his life. He grew a long beard and became, more than any of his bandmates, a musical mountain man, collecting guns and knives, skinning roadkill, and building a miniature pipe organ. With his reserved manner and technical skills, he lent the group a gravitas that set it apart from peers during the so-called Summer of Love, and he helped elevate The Band from rollicking juke-joint refugees into one of the most resonant and influential rock groups of the 1960s and ’70s.

On their debut LP, “Music From Big Pink,” Hudson immortalized the Lowery’s church-like pipe-organ tone with “Chest Fever,” whose extended introduction (sometimes referred to separately as “The Genetic Method”) would become his signature song. It begins with a fragment of Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D minor,” before launching into a landmark fusion of classical music reach, jazz wandering, and R&B grind that stands as perhaps the greatest organ performance in rock history. Legend holds that Hudson never played the intro the same way twice. Robertson once referred to him as “far and away the most advanced musician I’ve ever known.”

Jon Pareles, the highly respected rock critic at The New York Times, wrote eloquently about Hudson the other day: “Ever so self-effacingly, Garth Hudson breathed history into songs. At his magisterial Lowrey organ, he summoned Bach, hymns, the gospel church or a circus calliope. At the piano, he bounced through ragtime chords and splashed out filigrees of honky-tonk or jazz. On accordion, he could invoke a Cajun dance party, a medicine show, a polka or the skirl of a bagpipe. On saxophones, he built cozy studio horn sections and occasionally stepped forward for a plaintive solo. And as his equipment choices expanded, he deployed synthesizers and electric keyboards as scenic backdrops, brass bands and wry commentary.”

Hudson used an early version of the Hohner clavinet in his rig, which he famously ran through a wah-wah pedal, mimicking the sound of a jaw harp for The Band’s early classic “Up on Cripple Creek.”

After The Band called it quits in a very public way with its Thanksgiving Day concert dubbed “The Last Waltz” in 1976, Hudson continued working in studios and on the road with the likes of Van Morrison, Leonard Cohen and Emmylou Harris, as well as with various lineups of The Band, including the solo work of Robertson and Danko. By the 1990s, he began working with a younger group of musicians who idolized him and his work, including Neko Case, Norah Jones and Wilco. Hudson even released a solo LP, “The Sea to The North,” in 2001, and a set of covers with multiple artists called “Garth Hudson Presents a Canadian Celebration of The Band” in 2010.

Hudson endured some rough patches of financial difficulties matter-of-factly, even when some of his most cherished belongings were sold off by an impatient landlord. He even sold his publishing rights of The Band’s recordings to Robertson, yet showed no bitterness. “The deal was made,” he said. “It was a good gig. My job was to provide arrangements with pads and fills behind good poets, same poems every night, and I got out of it alive.”

R.I.P., Mr. Hudson. Your impact was perhaps greater than you ever knew.

****************************

I’ve assembled two Spotify playlists: one which assembles many of Sam Moore’s greatest musical moments, and another of songs on which Garth Hudson’s most notable contributions are featured.