ROBERTA FLACK

First Take: 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition

SOULMUSIC

THE quiet hum of appreciation that greeted Roberta Flack’s debut album in the summer of 1969 reflected the difficulty experienced by many critics of placing her on the spectrum of black female singers at the turn of the decade. Unlike Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight or Mavis Staples, there seemed to be no obvious church-raised fire in her delivery. She lacked the raw blues spirit that suffused the voices of Tina Turner or Etta James. And she was certainly not the willing mouthpiece, as Dionne Warwick and Diana Ross had become, of a team of pop svengalis. She was her own woman from the start, and that made her harder to