1971 · Behind the Songs
A quiet album cut by the man who wrote “Compared to What” — and, three years later, Flack’s biggest hit.
Track 3 of Quiet Fire is the album’s best-kept secret, and its credit line explains why Roberta Flack recorded it. “Sunday and Sister Jones” (4:48) was written by Gene McDaniels and produced by Joel Dorn, cut in New York with the same heavyweight cast that fills the album — Ron Carter on bass, Bernard Purdie on drums, Hubert Laws on flute, arrangements by Deodato and Arif Mardin, and backing vocals from Cissy Houston, Les McCann, and McDaniels himself. Quiet Fire (November 1971, Atlantic) reached No. 18 on the Billboard Top LPs & Tape, No. 5 on the Jazz chart and No. 4 R&B, earned Flack a Grammy nomination for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female, and went Gold — but this track was never a single. It didn’t need to be; it was a statement of allegiance.
McDaniels was no ordinary songwriter-for-hire. A decade earlier he had topped the charts himself with “A Hundred Pounds of Clay” (No. 3, early 1961) and “Tower of Strength” (No. 5, co-written with Burt Bacharach); after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968 he left America for Denmark and Sweden, returning with the Black-consciousness songbook that produced “Compared to What,” the protest standard Les McCann and Eddie Harris made famous on Swiss Movement — and which Flack herself had covered. Three years after “Sunday and Sister Jones,” McDaniels gave her “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” her 1974 No. 1. Heard in that light, the Quiet Fire cut sounds like a down payment: Flack recognizing, before the world did, that McDaniels was writing her future.