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Roberta Flack 02/2025

Roberta Flack (88) was born on February 10, 1937 in Black Mountain, North Carolina, to parents Laron Flack, a jazz pianist and U.S. Veterans Administration draftsman, and Irene Flack a cook and church organist. According to DNA analysis, Flack was of Cameroonian descent. Her family moved to Richmond, Virginia, before settling in Arlington, Virginia, when she was five years old.

Her first musical experiences were in church. She grew up in a large musical family and often provided piano accompaniment for the choir of Lomax African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church singing hymns and spirituals. She occasionally sings at the Macedonia Baptist Church in Arlington.  From time to time, she caught gospel stars like Mahalia Jackson and Sam Cooke performing there. Her father acquired a battered old piano for her, which she learned to play sitting on her mother’s lap and Flack took formal lessons in playing the piano when she was nine. She gravitated towards classical music and during her early teens excelled at classical piano, finishing second in a statewide competition for Black students aged 13 playing a Scarlatti sonata.
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Marianne Faithfull 1/2025

Marianne Faithfull (78) 1/2025 was born 29 December 1946 in Hemstead, London. Just to sketch her aristocracy come down it should be noted that

Faithfull was born at the old Queen Mary’s Maternity House in Hampstead, London. Her father, Major Robert Glynn Faithfull, was a British intelligence officer and professor of Italian literature at Bedford College, London University. Her mother, Eva, was the daughter of Artur Wolfgang Ritter von Sacher-Masoch (1875–1953), an Austro-Hungarian nobleman of old Polonized Catholic Ruthenian nobility. Eva was born in Budapest and moved to Vienna in 1918; she chose to style herself as Eva von Sacher-Masoch, Baroness Erisso in adulthood. She had been a ballerina for the Max Reinhardt Company during her early years, and danced in productions of works by the German theatrical duo Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. Continue reading Marianne Faithfull 1/2025