Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway: Soul Simpatico & Beyond

Their 1972 duets album remains a treasure of stylistic daring

A few years ago, I wrote about my love of Donny Hathaway and his music (read it here). He was an extraordinarily gifted singer, composer and arranger. Roberta Flack was too and their collaboration from 1972, titled just Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway, remains the high mark of their simpatico as well as of their collective vision of music, which was wide and deep. That album is the focus of the below essay which I hope you will enjoy. What do you think of Flack and Hathaway together? Let me know by dropping a comment.

Until next time, may good listening be with you all!

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Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway: Soul Simpatico & Beyond
By: Robert C. Gilbert

It strikes me as inevitable that Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway would eventually have recorded together. This hunch is unrelated to Hathaway contributing as a songwriter to Flack’s debut, First Take, or as both a songwriter and musician on her follow-up, Chapter Two. It’s more that both even as they were categorized as soul artists created music that resisted any requirement to be categorized at all.

Yes, Flack would record music that rested easy within the soul label whether it be her low-key version of ‘Compared to What,’ written by Eugene McDaniels, or the slinky groove of ‘Go Down Moses,’ co-written by the just-passed Rev. Jesse Jackson but these were part of her broader aesthetic that also included, for example, Leonard Cohen (‘Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye’) and Man of La Macha (‘The Impossible Dream’).

Hathaway was similarly broad in the repertoire he selected to record: ‘Misty’ (Erroll Garner), ‘I Believe in Music’ (Mac Davis) and ‘He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother’ (Bobby Scott) immediately come to mind.

There’s also the feeling that their voices could complement each other. Flack’s understated, conversational delivery would be a foil to Hathaway’s broader yet equally personal approach. Both, and I think this is the most critical consideration, could play with timing and melody. In other words, both had jazz chops.

Flack and Hathaway’s interest in music both started in the church and both took to the piano at a very young age. Both also studied music at Howard University. In an interview for the 2013 Hathaway collection, Never My Love: The Anthology, Flack recalled that it was at Howard in the late sixties when they first met.

Hathaway’s career began quickly after university with him signing a deal with Atco in 1969. Flack’s began after years of paying dues, including teaching, being an piano accompanist for opera singers and playing in clubs. It was in one of them that Les McCann heard her and used his pull to get signed to Atlantic in 1968. With Atco a subsidiary of Atlantic, Flack and Hathaway were labelmates.

It was Jerry Wexler, according to Flack, who first brought the two together to record. They duetted on a cover of Carole King’s ‘You’ve Got a Friend,’ a chart-topper for James Taylor, and it was released as a single with Flack’s recording of Hathaway’s ‘Gone Away’ from Chapter Two as the flipside. It was a top 30 hit in the summer of 1971: the first for both Flack, who eight months later had her first number one with ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ fueled by its use in Play Misty For Me, and Hathaway, whose only visits to the top 40 were when he was paired with Flack.

As per the custom, they were joined on ‘You’ve Got a Friend’ with a crack team of musicians who, like Flack and Hathaway, were wide-ranging: guitarist David Spinnoza, bassist Chuck Rainey, drummer Billy Cobham, percussionist Ralph Macdonald and flutist Joe Gentle with strings arranged by Arif Mardin.

It’s a transformative interpretation that with Spinnoza’s acoustic guitar still nods to Taylor’s version as well as King’s recording for Tapestry. The bridge is reharmonized, the move from the verses to the choruses is accentuated and then there’s the climax that comes with the assurance that “I’ll be there / yes I will.” These elements would also appear on Hathaway’s solo recording of ‘You’ve Got a Friend’ at the Troubadour on his live album from 1972 with he and audience making an impromptu choir and his off-the-cuff comment that “this might be a record here.”

His version with Flack is understated but clearly delivers on Wexler’s hunch that they should record together. Their voices blend as well as suspected: Flack is the anchor, Hathaway is the adventurer, recomposing King’s melody on the fly. For the final chorus, their voices layer over each other, tracked multiple times. The promise of that sound would be further explored on a full-length duet album recorded later in 1971 and released in the spring of 1972.

Titled simply Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway and with a stunning photo in the inner gatefold of the two, Hathaway seated and Flack on a window ledge with her hands around him—a warm, beautiful, inviting moment, the album is as bold as is most famous cut, ‘Where is the Love,’ is as yearnful as Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell on ‘Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing.’

That’s a tempting comparison to make, especially as it is not hard to imagine Gaye and Terrell recording something like ‘Where is the Love’ had their musical partnership not been so tragically fleeting. The William Salter-Ralph Macdonald ballad was the third Flack and Hathaway duet issued as a single. Prior to it was a moody, late-night take on Phil Spector, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil’s ‘You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’,’ which charted modestly. That recording, as opposed to ‘Where is the Love,’ a smash hit and, to be sure, an exquisite record where Flack and Hathaway’s harmony is so close they become one and with a sensual interlude, is a better representation of the album’s dynamic.

The operatic fervour of the Righteous Brothers’ famous version is dialed back to a kind of midnight confessional between two lovers, both of whom are reckoning with the malaise that has calcified in their relationship. The movement is slow and methodical, the resolution is far more uncertain than Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield left listeners. Like ‘You’ve Got a Friend,’ Flack and Hathaway treat the melody not like a text but as a reference point as they narrow the intervallic leaps over the course of the song. On the recording was the album’s core group: Rainey and Macdonald returning with Eric Gale on guitar and Bernard Purdie on drums with Joe Farrell guesting on soprano saxophone.

It closes out the album’s first side, an evocative bookend to the equally evocative opening of ‘I (Who Have Nothing),’ well-known through recordings by Ben E. King and Terry Knight and the Pack. They make one aesthetic direction of Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway. ‘Where is the Love’ is another and is followed on the second side by ‘When Love Has Grown,’ a sentimental, soft ballad written by Hathaway and Eugene McDaniels.

It’s a song that contrasts the end of a love affair with the promise of one that may grow. Flack and Hathaway trade lines and unite for the end of the verses. The interlude is majestic with strings arranged by Hathaway plus a paraphrase of the melody by him on piano and Hubert Laws on flute adding to the feeling of elation. For me, it’s the high point on an album with many of them (it was one of the recordings included on the playlist my wife and I put together for our wedding reception). Just as romantic, in a socio-political way, is ‘Be Real Black With Me,’ co-written by Flack and Hathaway with Charles Mann. It’s a celebration of Black love, of “your hair, soft and crinkly” and “your body, strong and stately” but has a universality in its assurance that “you don’t have to change a thing.”

More rollicking is a cover of “Baby, I Love You,’ Aretha Franklin’s third big hit on Atlantic, that is as country as it is soulful. It appears mid-way through the first side and is the initial hint of Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway’s astonishing variety. Side two, though, is where this versality goes into overdrive.

It begins with Hathaway solo on a standard, ‘For All We Know,’ written by Sam Lewis and J. Fred Coots. Backed by just Flack on piano and after two choruses of the verse, strings and woodwinds, he sings behind the beat, stretching out certain notes (check out his second “so love me tonight”) and always personalizing the melody. It’s an extraordinary example of these prodigious gifts he had as a singer. An almost-classical coda functions as a suitable benediction, a feel that returns on side two after ‘Where is the Love’ and ‘When Love Has Grown.’

Flack recalled how she had to call her mom to thumb through her hymnal to remind her and Hathaway of the lyrics of the second verse of ‘Come Ye Disconsolate.’ Their performance of it is stately, the cadence of their vocal is how it would sound if it were sung at Mass although I doubt congregants would elongate phrases like they do here. It’s another stylistic twist and the album closer, ‘Mood,’ credited to Flack, is a final one to savour.

It’s a seven-minute improvisation with Flack on piano and Hathaway on electric piano, both playing impressionistically. On a lesser album, ‘Mood’ could seem like filler but here, it’s another expression of the dimensions of Flack and especially, in this instance, Hathaway, who loved classical music.

They would continue to record together. ‘The Closer I Get to You,’ from 1977, marked Hathaway’s return to recording after years spent dealing with growing mental-health issues. They began a second duet album at the end of 1978 but only two performances: ‘You Are My Heaven’ and ‘Back Together Again’ were completed before Hathaway’s untimely death. That makes Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway even more of a treasure than it already is.