Roberta was playing in a club called Mr Henry’s in Washington DC in 1968 and I’d go regularly down there with some of my band members to see her perform. She was one of the musical staples there and you could see why. Her voice was one of a kind. It just reached out and touched you. She had that ability to be expressive and restrained at the same time. She didn’t try to overpower you with emotion.
Roberta could not be put in a box marked soul or pop or whatever. She could sing anything – and did – but you knew it was her as soon as she opened her mouth.
When she covered a song like The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face [written by Ewan MacColl], she made it her own. We both sang grown-up songs about grown-up subjects, songs that registered with adults as well as teenagers.
We became dear friends rather quickly. Roberta was what I would describe as a soft person, quiet and very knowledgable about music and about life, but she could be very stern, too.
She graduated from Howard University [in Washington DC] and became a music teacher, so she had a certain quiet confidence. She was also very, very funny. She made me laugh in a hot minute.
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I think we got on because we shared similar values. We were both from Baptist church backgrounds and we had started off singing gospel. We were brought up to be respectful. We had a deep respect for what we were doing, not only technically and formally, but in terms of our responsibility to the composer who wrote the music and the lyricist who wrote the words. They wanted to hear what they had created, not what you thought they had created. You could interpret their songs to a degree, of course, but that happened more often in live performances. That’s where you could take liberties.
It was a very special time back then in the 1960s, but also a very turbulent time. There was a craziness in the southern region of our country that I personally found kind of stupid. The racism I experienced there was like nothing I had ever seen or felt before. I came from New York, where people were people, whatever race, colour or creed they were, so it was a shock the first time I was confronted with anything of that nature. To read about it and to experience it were two very different things and I’m sure Roberta felt the same, though we seldom talked about it.
Back then, it was hard to keep control of your career. The industry was run by white men, but I had Florence Greenberg of Scepter Records looking out for me. She was probably the only female owner of a record company at that time and we referred to her as “mother hen.” I know Roberta had her creative struggles early on. She wanted to be a classical pianist when she was younger, but that wasn’t an option, though she always included one or two classical pieces in her live repertoire. She was an effortlessly brilliant piano player as well as a gifted singer.
We were both what I would call “good girls”, by which I mean we were brought up to be good. We always paid attention to how we looked, what we said, and how we conducted ourselves. That was easy to do if you had parents like ours, and we stayed true to that even when the flower children reigned and things became a whole lot looser for a while. I think we both always remembered what we had been taught in church early on: that we were musical messengers and that people had to understand the message. So you always had to think about how best to express it.
In that gospel tradition, there was a lot of communal encouragement and a great sense of happiness and joy in expressing yourself through song. That joy remained a constant throughout both our lives. I remember when we toured England in the 1980s with Mary Wilson [of the Supremes], we had the best time. We laughed so much. We were never rivals. What were we going to be rivals about? We were there to uplift and inspire.
Roberta was a great and truly gifted artist, but when I think of her now it is as a true friend. It was easy to be friends with her. I don’t think we could have been anything other than close. Almost from the moment we met, we were there for each other and with each other.
Photograph by Getty Images