In the final hour of the final day that Roberta Flack drew breath on this earth, everything inside Mr. Henry’s is quiet. There are two men seated at the bar. A bartender standing behind it. All three keeping mum while “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” seeps from the jukebox across the room. This was the very building where Flack once drew crowds in the late 1960s, so awestruck and buzzy that their noise eventually helped her land a recording contract. But now, as the minutes slide away toward midnight, the only sounds available are the low hum of refrigeration, the tiny jingle of melting ice cubes, and Flack gently singing about a happiness that could “fill the earth and last till the end of time.”
Mourners have already come and gone. News of Flack’s death — at 88 in Manhattan — broke early Monday, drawing heavier-than-usual crowds to this decades-old Capitol Hill pub for lunch, dinner and evening drinks. No throngs. No vigil. But pretty good for a Monday night in February, the bartender says. The stairs that lead up to the second floor — a room that the bar’s late owner, Henry Yaffe, opened specifically for Flack to perform in — is cordoned off with a waist-high bolt of silvery fabric, attached to the wall with a padlock. But around the corner, above the ground-floor bar, history is marked with an old wooden sign painted in twisting script and blocky serifs: “Roberta Flack Trio TUES. thru SAT.”
End of carousel
Flack’s ideas about eternity developed inside these walls as she performed from a some 600-song repertoire, five nights a week. This was after a childhood in Arlington, Virginia, spent drilling Scarlatti and church hymns on the piano, which allowed her to enter Howard University to study music at 15. She then became a teacher, then a gigging musician, and when her debut album, “First Take,” landed in 1969, she was pictured on the cover performing in the smoky darkness of Mr. Henry’s.
“First Take” still feels staggering in its breadth, containing songs about Black people’s struggles for social justice (the lean, grooving “Compared to What” and “Tryin’ Times”); songs of empathy and solidarity (“Ballad of the Sad Young Men,” meant to honor the gay audiences who frequented Mr. Henry’s); and love songs so profound (“The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” and “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye”) Flack said she was always trying to return to them. “The ultimate goal is to hold on to the magic that makes ‘The First Time’ sound good to you after all these years,” she told The Washington Post in 1989. The fact that a debut album this assured, this unhurried was recorded in a mere 10 hours feels almost impossible to believe. But that’s what Tues. thru Sat. gets you. Flack was prepared.
The world was not. It wasn’t until “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” — a folk song penned by Ewan MacColl for Peggy Seeger — appeared on the soundtrack of Clint Eastwood’s 1971 film, “Play Misty for Me,” that Flack shot to the top of the charts, winning the Grammy for record and song of the year in 1973. The feat was repeated in 1974 with “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” a luscious and evocative ballad made famous across generations when the Fugees covered it in 1996. But as the ’70s wore into the ’80s, pop taxonomists didn’t know what to do with Flack’s singularity. She was deeply fluent in jazz, folk, soul and gospel, rendering everything in fine detail through her classically trained touch. The music industry’s box-makers never found the container. Some defaulted to calling her music “soft” pop, which at least recognized it for its formal qualities.
Was softness the main quality, though? Flack’s singing was delicate without being dainty, and she knew how to create intimacy without getting too close. She commanded attention without ever bending for it, and without becoming stiff or stubborn, either. That exactly rightness is what made her so indelible. It allowed her to get all the way inside a song, then reveal it as a model of infinity. You can hear it word for word. She cared about her consonants as much as her vowels, closing syllables as if she were closing books. Go listen to the opening line of “The First Time,” how both of the T’s in the titular phrase are granted their own moments on her teeth. She sounds so at ease, so respectful. She’s respecting the lyric, respecting the song, respecting her listener, respecting herself.
Inside Mr. Henry’s, with midnight building like an approaching wave, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” gets an encore spin on the jukebox. It’s one of those too-big, too-bright touch-screen things that gives unpleasant flashbacks to airport check-in kiosks. A dollar gives you two credits, but that’s the cost of one song, and the screen is hard to type on, and while there are 15 Roberta Flack albums on the menu, there are only 71 Roberta Flack songs available in total. A jukebox that promises everything, but not really. An infinity with weird borders.
Then “The First Time” plays for a second time, and Flack’s musical infinity re-perfumes this wonderful room, gently pushing up against more familiar borders. How did the Mr. Henry’s crowd move their bodies to this song in 1969? It’s slower than a slow dance, and it seems to last twice as long on its second spin. If you can forget about your body and commit to letting this music fool your brain, it can be a buffer: a cushion between the preciousness of right now and a future that’s coming whether you like it or not. “The first time ever I saw your face,” she sings, “I thought the sun rose in your eyes.” Time keeps stretching out, and for the next few minutes, the first day in this life without Roberta Flack feels as if it’s being postponed.
