ROBERTA FLACK, PHOTOGRAPHED BY JACK MITCHELL IN 1971. © THE ESTATE OF JACK MITCHELL.

GME honors the artistry and legacy of singer-songwriter Roberta Flack with this photograph of Flack taken by Jack Mitchell in 1971 — a year before her recording of Ewan MacColl's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" became a number-one hit and made her an international star. Flack passed away on February 24, 2025, at the age of 88. Mitchell's portrait of Flack is featured in the exhibition Harlem, Hollywood, Broadway: African American Legends, which first opened at the Huntsville Museum of Art in Alabama in January 2020.

Flack excelled at classical piano from a young age, a talent that won her a scholarship to Howard University. While performing jazz in various nightclubs in Washington D.C., she was discovered by pianist and singer Leslie McCann, who got her a contract with Atlantic Records. Flack's debut album FIRST TAKE (1969) — which featured her recording of "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" — sold poorly upon initial release. Two years later, Clint Eastwood featured Flack's cover of MacColl's song in his directorial debut, the critically- and commercially-successful thriller PLAY MISTY FOR ME. The popularity of Eastwood's film introduced Flack's recording to a wider audience, and "The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face" went on to become the biggest hit of 1972, winning the Grammy Award for Record of the Year. Her success on the charts continued with such hits as "Killing Me Softly With His Song" and "Feel Like Makin' Love," and two duets with Donny Hathaway, "Where Is The Love?" and "The Closer I Get to You." During this period, Flack was acclaimed by eminent music critic Robert Christgau as “the most significant new black woman singer since Aretha Franklin.”

With a musical style that fused elements of pop, soul, R&B, classical, and jazz into something new and altogether different, her influence transcended genres. As National Public Radio's Jason King observed in 2025: “The nature of her power as a performer — to generate rapturous, spellbinding mood music and to plumb the depths of soulful heaviness by way of classically-informed technique — is not too easy to claim or make sense with the limited tools that we have in music criticism.”

Over the course of his half-century professional career, photographer Jack Mitchell documented a unique history of artists in the fields of dance, theatre, music, the fine arts, film, and television. The Estate of Jack Mitchell is exclusively represented by Gartenberg Media Enterprises, Inc. for placement of the archive and exhibition of his work. For inquiries regarding Mitchell’s photographs, please email info@gartenbergmedia.com.

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Roberta Flack (1937—2025)