THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD
1,824) Roberta Flack — “I Told Jesus”
Here is Roberta Flack’s (see #61, 701) “quietly spine-tingling” (Richard Williams, https://thebluemoment.com/2025/02/24/roberta-flack-in-london/) “arrangement of the traditional ‘I Told Jesus'[, possessing a] simmering power”. (John Bush, https://www.allmusic.com/album/first-take-mw0000193572) Ethan Iverson writes: “A slow waltz with Flack’s piano and [Ron] Carter’s bass just easing along the basic form. Flack’s voice raises and breaks. A powerful and spiritual performance. Interesting to compare with Marian Anderson’s earlier recording of the same lyric, ‘If He Change My Name.'” (https://open.substack.com/pub/iverson/p/tt-492-roberta-flack-first-take?r=sxm27&utm_medium=ios)
Anwen Crawford tells us:
At the centre of [her first LP] First Take is Flack’s arrangement of the hymn “I Told Jesus”. It’s a song about the cost of following one’s conscience. The singer asks Jesus to change her name, and Jesus warns her, “The world will turn away from you, child, if I change your name.” The singer replies that this will be alright, and as the world does exactly what Jesus has predicted – father, mother, brother each turning away – Flack digs into the bass octaves on her piano like a climber finding foothold. Horns and strings rise around her, clouds that skim the summit that she’s seeking. For the final time she vows, “It’d be alright, if He’d change my name.” And as she summits her mountaintop, her last “my” rippling like a flag in the wind, I am reminded, all of a sudden, of an old and chilling record made in 1926 by a singer named Homer Quincy Smith. The song Smith sang, accompanied only by an organ, is called “I Want Jesus to Talk With Me”, and, at the end of it, Smith does something very similar to what Flack does with her “my”, making his last “me” high and cold and lonely, into a multi-syllabic flourish of self-assertion that is also an abnegation, because the cost of making a moral choice might include the sacrifice of a self you’d always known, even if – especially if – no reward follows. Maybe there’s no way off the mountaintop, or Jesus isn’t there.
https://www.themonthly.com.au/october-2020/arts-letters/listening-roberta-flack
Here is more about the meaning of the song: https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=120730.
Elizabeth Nelson gives us some background:
Throughout most of the eventful year of 1968, . . Roberta Flack was ensconced in a residency at Mr. Henry’s in Washington, D.C., an unfancy but inimitably hip jazz club . . . . Following the April 4 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., riots broke out in several cities, including the District. Flack continued performing her sets, lines forming around the block. . . . No artist working in the moment was doing a finer job of chronicling those tenuous, terrifying, revolutionary times. . . . [She] was admitted to Howard University’s top-flight music program at the age of 15, possessing prodigious jazz and classical chops and a voice splitting the difference between Sarah Vaughan’s elegant alto and Etta James’ [see #316, 498, 1,585] deep-blue expressiveness. . . . She spent some wilderness years teaching high school, but word of mouth spread, and soon enough they came to her. When visiting jazz legend Les McCann was dragged along by friends to see Flack perform one night, he immediately provided his most forceful recommendation to Atlantic, and soon after she was signed. Flack’s debut, First Take [including today’s song] was recorded over a period of 10 hours at Atlantic Studios in New York, in February 1969. Her extraordinary backing band, consisting of stalwarts Bucky Pizzarelli on guitar, Ron Carter on bass, Ray Lucas on drums, and other heavy hitters gelled with seamless immediacy, as Flack lead them through a repertoire of . . . material she had spent countless hours perfecting at Mr. Henry’s.
https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/roberta-flack-first-take/
Steve Huey tells us of her later career:
Classy, urbane, reserved, smooth, and sophisticated — all of these terms have been used to describe the music of Roberta Flack, particularly her string of romantic, light jazz ballad hits in the 1970s . . . . Her first two albums[, including] 1969’s First Take . . . were well received but produced no hit singles; however, that all changed when a version of Ewan MacColl’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” from her first LP, [see #61] was included in the soundtrack of the 1971 film Play Misty for Me. The single zoomed to number one in 1972 and remained there for six weeks, becoming that year’s biggest hit. Flack followed it with the first of several duets with Howard classmate Donny Hathaway [see #573], “Where Is the Love.” “Killing Me Softly with His Song” became Flack’s second number one hit (five weeks) in 1973, and after topping the charts again in 1974 with “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” Flack took a break from performing to concentrate on recording and charitable causes. . . . A major blow was struck in 1979 when her duet partner, one of the most creative voices in soul music, committed suicide. Devastated, Flack eventually found another creative partner in Peabo Bryson, with whom she toured in 1980.
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/roberta-flack-mn0000290072/biography
Here is Marian Anderson:
Here is James Cleveland and the Southern California Community Choir:
Here is Richard Smallwood & Union Temple Young Adult Choir:
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