For most listeners, Roberta Flack is the voice of hushed, candlelit ballads — the singer who seemed to whisper directly into your ear. But the very first sound on her very first album is not a whisper. It is a snarl set to a funk groove: a furious catalogue of everything wrong with America in 1969, delivered by a classically trained schoolteacher who had been playing piano in a Washington, D.C. bar. Compared to What opened First Take in June 1969, became Flack’s debut single, and then — in one of pop’s stranger twists — made its writer and her mentor famous in somebody else’s version before it ever made her famous in her own.
A Songwriter Radicalized
Gene McDaniels knew the pop business from the inside. As a singer in the early 1960s he had scored hits with A Hundred Pounds of Clay and Tower of Strength, smooth records that gave no hint of the anger he would soon be writing. As the decade darkened — civil rights marches, assassinations, an escalating war in Vietnam — McDaniels turned to songwriting with a new edge, earning the nickname “the Left Reverend” for material that mixed gospel fire with political fury.
Compared to What was his sharpest weapon. Written in the mid-1960s, it is a litany of hypocrisies: a president with his war that nobody can explain, churches and politicians mouthing pieties, poverty and racial injustice papered over with slogans. Every verse lands on the same exhausted refrain — everybody now, compared to what? McDaniels’ old bandmate Les McCann recorded it first, as a slow ballad, on his 1966 album Les McCann Plays the Hits. In that form it barely rippled. The song needed a different kind of singer, and McCann was about to find her.
What the Song Actually Says
Part of the challenge of Compared to What — in 1969 as now — is its sheer density of grievance. McDaniels packs the verses with targets: the war in Vietnam and a president who, the lyric charges, cannot say what it is for; the church that preaches while the parishioners starve; the well-fed complacency of people who have decided that everything is fine. The famous refrain is not really a question. It is a demand for a standard of measurement — an insistence that the official story of America be compared, line by line, with the real one.
McDaniels had arrived at this fury honestly. A working singer who had tasted the top of the charts at the start of the decade, he spent the civil-rights years moving toward the movement, and his writing darkened accordingly. He would go on to write for Flack again, to record his own cult albums of jazz-funk protest such as Outlaw and Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse, and to be sampled by a generation of hip-hop producers. But Compared to What remained the song that defined him: five minutes of testimony that two different artists, in the same year, turned into landmarks.
The Teacher in the Bar
Roberta Flack’s road to Atlantic Records ran through a classroom and a nightclub. Born in Black Mountain, North Carolina, in 1937 and raised in Arlington, Virginia, she was a prodigy who entered Howard University on a music scholarship at fifteen. After graduating she taught school in Washington, accompanying her meagre salary by singing and playing piano at Mr. Henry’s, a Capitol Hill restaurant and bar, where she built a devoted local following with a repertoire that ran from folk and blues to opera.
Les McCann, by then an established soul-jazz pianist, heard her in Washington in 1968 — accounts place the encounter at a benefit concert and at the clubs where she worked — and was knocked out. He arranged an audition with Atlantic Records producer Joel Dorn. The audition became legend: Flack reportedly played forty-two songs in three hours, showing Dorn the full range of what she could do. Atlantic signed her, and McCann became her manager. In November 1968 she cut a batch of demonstration recordings; three months later she was back in Atlantic’s New York studios making her debut album.
Ten Hours in the Studio
First Take was recorded in February 1969, in sessions totalling roughly ten hours — an astonishingly fast birth for an album now considered a classic. Flack sang and played piano, backed by a superb jazz trio: Ron Carter on bass, Bucky Pizzarelli on guitar and Ray Lucas on drums, with strings and horns overdubbed later. Dorn’s production trusted his singer completely, and the running order led with the angriest song she had.
Flack’s Compared to What is a different animal from McCann’s 1966 ballad. Where he had brooded, she attacks: Carter’s bassline stalks underneath her piano, and she sings McDaniels’ verses with a preacher’s timing and a prosecutor’s precision, letting the repeated question hang in the air like an accusation. It remains one of the most forceful performances of her career — proof, for anyone who thinks of her only as a balladeer, that the quiet storm began with thunder.
Atlantic released the track as her first single in 1969. It failed to chart, and First Take, released that June, sold modestly. The protest song that opened it seemed destined to be a footnote.
The Record Itself
Heard today, Flack’s Compared to What — five minutes and sixteen seconds, the longest statement on the album — is a lesson in how she built intensity without volume. The arrangement grows from her piano and Carter’s prodding bass into a full band performance with horn players of the calibre of Joe Newman and Frank Wess in the ensemble, but the centre never moves: it is her voice, level and unhurried, letting the accusations accumulate until the refrain feels less sung than sworn. The jazz critics who reviewed First Take heard it immediately — one early assessment called the track the single exception to the album’s meditative mood, the moment where Flack proved she could belt with the best soul singers in America.
It is worth pausing on that doubleness, because it defined her. The same sessions produced the most delicate ballad of the era and one of its angriest protest records, sometimes within the same afternoon. Atlantic, unsure how to sell a conservatory-trained pianist who sang folk songs, jazz standards and street protest with equal conviction, marketed her cautiously. The market would decide for them, three years later, and it would choose the ballad — but the woman who sang Compared to What never went away. She is audible in the steel beneath every quiet record Flack ever made.
Montreux Steals the Song
Four months after Flack recorded it, Les McCann travelled to Switzerland for the Montreux Jazz Festival. On June 21, 1969, he sat down for an impromptu set with tenor saxophonist Eddie Harris — the two had not planned to perform together — with trumpeter Benny Bailey, bassist Leroy Vinnegar and drummer Donald Dean completing the band, and opened with his friend McDaniels’ song. This time the arrangement was a swaggering soul-jazz vamp, McCann testifying at the piano while Harris wailed over the top, and the crowd roared. The performance became the opening track of the live album Swiss Movement.
Released late in 1969, Swiss Movement was a sensation: the album was certified gold, spent thirty-eight weeks on the Billboard 200, and its single of Compared to What sold over a million copies, reaching No. 35 on the R&B chart and crossing over to the pop chart. The royalties let McDaniels give up singing in nightclubs. The song went on to be recorded by more than 270 performers, including Ray Charles and Brian Auger, and the McCann–Harris groove was later sampled by hip-hop artists including Massive Attack, Mobb Deep and the Notorious B.I.G.
Flack, whose version had come first, could only watch. Yet the story had a final turn. In 1971, Clint Eastwood used another First Take track, The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, in his film Play Misty for Me. Suddenly the world wanted the album it had ignored: First Take climbed to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in the spring of 1972 and stayed there for five weeks, eventually going platinum and, decades later, entering the Grammy Hall of Fame. The album has since been named to Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. Listeners who came for the ballad discovered, at track one, a protest singer.
And the wheel kept turning: in 1974, Flack took another Gene McDaniels song, Feel Like Makin’ Love, to No. 1 — the writer of her angriest record giving her one of her most sensuous. McDaniels died in 2011, McCann in 2023; both men outlived the era that made the song necessary and saw it become a standard of protest soul. Compared to What endures as the opening statement of a career that is usually described in whispers: before Roberta Flack sang softly, she had already said, at full volume, exactly what she thought.