Music icon and Grammy-winning singer Roberta Flack was once an English teacher. Photo Credit: IMDB

Many people have heard of Grammy Award-winning songwriter and singer Roberta Flack. Her best-known songs are “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” and “Where Is the Love?” But did you know that this celebrated jazz, folk, and R&B icon was once a public school teacher?

Roberta Cleopatra Flack was born February 10, 1937, in Black Mountain, Buncombe County, North Carolina. She was raised in Arlington, Virginia. Her mother was a church organist, so of course Roberta grew up in a musical household. At the age of nine, Roberta began to study classical piano, and by the time she was fifteen, she’d earned a full scholarship in music from Howard University. Howard is a traditionally Black college located in Washington, DC.

Roberta completed her undergraduate work, and then her student teaching at an all-white school near Chevy Chase, Maryland. She was the first African American student teacher to work at that school. After her college graduation, Roberta accepted a position teaching music and English in Farmville, North Carolina, a gig which paid her only $2,800 per year. She also taught in Washington, DC, at Browne Junior High and Rabaut Junior High School. While she was teaching, she took a number of side jobs as a night club singer. It was there that she was discovered and signed to a contract for Atlanta Records. The rest, as they say, is music business history.

Over the course of her music career, the former teacher has been nominated for a Grammy 13 times, winning on four occasions. On May 11, 2017, Roberta received an honorary Doctorate degree in the Arts from Long Island University. In 2009 she was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame, and in 2022, she was honored with the Women in American History War by the Daughters of the American Revolution.

In recent years, Roberta continues to contribute to education came when she founded an after-school music program entitled “The Roberta Flack School of Music” to provide music education free of charge to underprivileged students in the Bronx borough of New York City. The program is offered through Hyde Leadership Charter School. You can learn more about this program at this link: Roberta Flack School of Music.