Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway - WPLJ Radio, A & R Studios, New York City, 11-24-1971

Here's something I just discovered the other day. So it went to the top of my ever-growing pile of albums to post.

I've posted a few albums by female soul singer Roberta Flack, but this is the first with soul singer and songwriter Donny Hathaway. Hathaway is considered a soul legend these days, but his music career was rather short and troubled. He started to hit it big with the hit single "The Ghetto" in 1969. But he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 1971. Mental illness wreaked havoc on his life and his career after that, and he had to be hospitalized multiple times. He committed suicide in 1979.

Here's his Wikipedia page, for more info about him:

Donny Hathaway - Wikipedia

One bright spot in his musical career was his frequent duets with Roberta Flack. They put out a duet album in 1972, "Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway," and had some hit singles together in the late 1970s. That said, it seems they didn't perform in concert together much, since Hathaway didn't perform concerts that often after his mental health issues got worse. There are no official live recordings of them together that I know of, and virtually no such bootlegs either.

So I was pleasantly surprised to find the bootleg I'm sharing here on YouTube. I converted it into mp3 format and divided it into individual tracks. This show was recorded in front of a small studio audience for a live radio broadcast. The sound quality is excellent, just as good as an official live album from the time period.

Their 1972 album didn't come out until May of that year. This concert is from November 1971. However, most of the songs here are ones on that 1972 album. I'm guessing most or all of that album was recorded roughly around the time of this concert. Two singles from the album were released in late 1971.

The last two songs come from a different source, a US TV special broadcast in 1972 called "Double Exposure." The sound quality of those is significantly worse. The music even wobbles at a couple of points. So you might consider those bonus tracks of sorts. I included them mostly because Flack had a massive hit in 1972 with the song "The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face," and I thought it would be good to include a version of that.

Note that on a lot of these songs the vocals are dominated more by Flack than Hathaway. But I believe Hathaway at least played keyboards on all the songs. Although Hathaway was a talented songwriter, he wasn't prolific and most of the songs are covers.

This album is 49 minutes long without the last two songs, and 58 minutes long if you include those too.

01 talk (Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway)
02 Where Is the Love (Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway)
03 You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' (Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway)
04 talk (Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway)
05 When Love Has Grown (Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway)
06 Will You Love Me Tomorrow (Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway)
07 You've Got a Friend (Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway)
08 For All We Know (Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway)
09 Baby I Love You (Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway)
10 I [Who Have Nothing] (Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway)
11 talk (Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway)
12 Little Ghetto Boy (Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway)
13 Be Real Black for Me (Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway)
14 Someday (Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway)
15 The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face (Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15218635/RobertaFlDonnyH_1971_WPLJRadioARStdiosNYC__11-24-1971_atse.zip.html

The cover photo comes from a concert that took place at UCLA in Los Angeles in September 1972. It was the only good color photo of the two of them on stage that I could find.