Roberta Flack

When did you get your first piano? My father... went to what was obviously a junkyard to get this. Because when the piano came back, and I will remember this as long as I live, there was such an odor because little rat tiny people had been living in it, obviously.

It was a wonderful time to be there. I mean, for a person who was born in the ghetto like I was to be in a situation where people walked in and said, play Gershwin, play an aria from La Boheme, play something from La Traviata, and I could deliver that.

Music is everything to me. Music is my life. Music is the meaning because it is the only thing that I would not want to live without.

At one point I was teaching physical education and I thought,

Math classes, I taught English classes. Which is a waste, I guess.

No, not a waste, but not music. Flack played her early gigs around Washington, D.C.

I decided to stop teaching school after I had worked for the summer as a singer at a little club on Capitol Hill where a lot of senators came with their families on Sundays, and it was also a gay bar, and it was like...

Singing my life with his words.

Come on, come on, come on.