Yearning for Love

Roberta Flack was one of my first experiences of black music, of female torch singing, and of the wondrous combinations that folk and jazz and rock can make. It was my roommate’s album, and one or the other of us played it at least once every night.  The college was an all-girl, catholic institution still run by the nuns.  The dress code included evening wear once a week for dinner and no slacks below the second floor of the dormitory. By the time I graduated from (the same) college four years later, it was a co-ed secular institution and the dress code was “Please, no nude sunbathing in the quadrangle.”

Yes, it was the sixties. Political unrest, civil rights, anti-war rallys, marching on Washington, and trying to grow up and get an education at the same time. One year finals were canceled both semesters.  Before Christmas the Black students took over the academic building, and in the Spring Nixon bombed Cambodia and even good Catholic girls were moved to protest. The sexual revolution was happening right along with that, and Roberta Flack helped me make sense of feelings not discussed with or by good Catholic girls. 

She also taught me that these emotions can be acted out (safely?) in song. Given the “all girl” nature of the college, that was a godsend.  The legal decision to become co-ed didn’t attract hordes of male underclassmen. Roberta’s soul was very definitely linked to a female body, and she was someone who sang what I felt, or anyway what I wanted to feel. She probably set unrealistic expectations for love, for life, and for my musical ability; but she also let me yearn and strive and hurt, and love along with her.