Commentary: Mourning the end of a beautiful life and over the foundations of that beauty being destroyed in a post-civil rights era
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If there is one thing I learned as a Tacoma DJ, critic and writer is that people listen to Black music to survive. Organizing mixes for aunties, bros and homegirls, I understood my mixes were not the mixes to a party as much as a support system to get people through their blues. This is the reason the deaths of its greatest practitioners are met with such a personalized sorrow. People don’t just cry for Marvin, Michael, Donny and Whitney because of their fates, but because they knew fathers who prepared sons for nothing but the graveyard, people who failed to smile away their pain and sisters who suffered because they weren’t allowed to be themselves.
Why are so many people of Black Threads, X and Bluesky crying for Roberta Flack right now? “Come Ye Disconsolate,” a duet classic with Donny Hathaway, provides an answer. The language and structure touch on how Black African Methodist Episcopal Churches seasoned 18th- and 19th-century English religious music. The piano, phrasing and performance of her and Hathaway harkens the Pentecostal church tradition of alchemizing shouts and wails heard in various slave rituals. The subject of the song was the Black preacher as artist healer as described by W.E.B. Du Bois in “The Souls Of Black Folk.” Schooled in the African Methodist storefronts of the Black Mountains she grew up in and the classical music and spiritual education she received in Howard, Flack was a comforter on high ceremony. She put gospel and the spirituals into avant-garde soul and pop forms, and they became Joshua Generation templates that drew masses of elder black fans and provided a vocabulary that almost every great indie soul artist after her drew from.
Yet all of her musical experiments take a back seat to the beauty of her voice. To understand its tone and range, you also have to know how the vocal traditions melded in the cultural interchanges between slaves and Irish immigrants in the Baltimore docks. In Flack’s singing, you can hear centuries of intermingling between ring shouts, Irish block singing and East African Sunni Muslim traditions. It is the reason that the notes she holds in “The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face” and “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” sound like an Imam’s call to prayer. It is the reason that the aforementioned “Disconsolate” has the gravity of a wake benediction. It is the reason the “Come On People, Come On Children” in her cover on Laura Nyro’s “Save The Country” still sounds like a call to steal away from the tribalism that continues to make this nation sick.
Flack’s belief in a New Jerusalem was one of the many things she had in common with Hathaway, her duet partner, Howard colleague and (also like Flack) one of the most moving singers to walk the face of the earth. That his beautiful music couldn’t keep him and the shibboleths Black folks around him have around mental illness helped lead to his suicide is one of the great tragedies of Black history. It’s not hard to hear her retreat into easy listening as a response to what happened to him. There was so much history and gravity to her work and their bond that I can’t blame her for not wanting to think about how horrible that part of her life ended. Yet generations of eclectics who thought outside the box came to remind her and the world of how much she meant: first the Fugees, then D’angelo and Scarface, then Beyonce and then almost every alternative soul talent who liked to color outside of a box. They were the children that her music saved, who went down to that glory river with her music and wanted to bring her and her legacy along.
Yet is the country she sang about going to be saved? She lived a long life, and ALS dominated the final part of it. Yet as I write this, I am crying with the elders on social media who can’t give her tributes without breaking down. For I know they aren’t weeping for the end of a beautiful life as they are over the foundations of that beauty being destroyed. We live in a post-civil rights America where so much of MAGA resembles the white terrorism those elders wanted to think in their past, and a pop culture landscape that, outside of the orbits of Kendrick, Beyonce, Bad Bunny and Lady Gaga, has painfully little culture or comfort to give them or their children. It is an understatement to say Roberta Flack did more than enough and isn’t suffering anymore.
Yet excuse me if the next time I see Kanye scream a Nazi obscenity and some MAGA gamer influencer co-signs it, I think of Flack and weep like a child.
— By Robert Lashley
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