Flip over the biggest single of 1972 and you will find a small masterpiece hiding in its shadow. Roberta Flack’s The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face spent six weeks at No. 1, finished the year as Billboard’s top song, and won Grammy Awards for Record and Song of the Year. On the B-side of that single sat Trade Winds, a five-and-a-half-minute ballad of parting and distant shores written by two young songwriters in Flack’s own band. It was never an A-side, never a hit under her name — and yet, carried from singer to singer across the decade, it quietly became a standard.
The Percussionist Who Wrote Songs
Ralph MacDonald was born in Harlem in 1944 to Trinidadian parents, raised on calypso, and good enough on percussion to join Harry Belafonte’s band as a teenager, where he stayed for a decade and rose to arrange and conduct. In 1967, with Bill Eaton and bassist-songwriter William Salter, he formed the publishing company Antisia Music, and began writing in earnest. When Flack’s career took off, MacDonald joined her world as her percussionist — the conga and tambourine colours on her records are often his — and he and Salter started supplying her with songs.
Their breakthrough came in 1971, when Flack and Donny Hathaway recorded the MacDonald–Salter composition Where Is the Love. Released as a single in 1972, it reached No. 5 on the Hot 100, topped the R&B chart, sold a million copies and won the Grammy for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals. MacDonald, who played on the session, had written the song with Salter intending to pitch it to the Fifth Dimension; in Flack and Hathaway’s hands it became a standard almost overnight. The same partnership would later give Grover Washington Jr. and Bill Withers Just the Two of Us and Washington his signature Mister Magic.
MacDonald was, meanwhile, woven into the fabric of Flack’s own records. His percussion is part of the sound of Killing Me Softly with His Song itself — those are his congas and tambourine colours on the biggest hit of her career — and he and Salter, working from their Antisia Music base in Stamford, Connecticut, supplied a stream of material to her circle. Trade Winds was one of the pieces from that fertile period: written by the two men who had already handed her a Grammy-winning duet, and recorded by her in the same years.
Trade Winds came from the same pen and the same circle. It is a sailor’s farewell: a love left standing on the shore, a singer carried off by the winds that move ships and separate people, the promise and the uncertainty of return woven through a melody that drifts rather than marches. Where Where Is the Love asked a question about the world, Trade Winds asked one about distance — and it needed a singer who could hold a note, and a mood, for a very long time.
MacDonald’s heritage was in the song’s bones. Raised on the steelpan and calypso music of Trinidad, he spent his career translating Caribbean rhythm into American soul, and Trade Winds — its title borrowed from the steady ocean winds that once powered the sailing routes of the Atlantic — carries that inheritance in its gentle, swaying pulse. Salter, his writing partner, was a bassist and arranger as well as a composer, and the Antisia team built songs from the rhythm section outward. This one was built to be sung slowly, by someone in no hurry to reach the shore.
Buried on the Flip
Flack’s recording, produced by Joel Dorn, runs five minutes and thirty-seven seconds — far too long and far too unhurried for a pop single in 1972. Atlantic’s use for it was the back of a phenomenon. When The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face exploded in the spring of 1972, propelled by its appearance in Clint Eastwood’s Play Misty for Me — Eastwood, a jazz fan, had famously paid just $2,000 for the rights to use the recording — the single (Atlantic 45-2864) carried Trade Winds as its B-side into millions of homes, where most buyers, understandably, played the other side.
Consider what the A-side achieved, because it measures the size of the shadow. The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face spent six consecutive weeks at No. 1, was certified gold, finished 1972 as Billboard’s No. 1 song of the year, lifted its parent album First Take to five weeks at No. 1, and won the Grammy Awards for Record of the Year and Song of the Year. Against that glare, the flip side never stood a chance of independent attention. Yet Atlantic’s choice of coupling mattered more than anyone knew: it put a MacDonald–Salter song, sung by Flack at her most spacious and unhurried, into the record collections of exactly the audience — and exactly the fellow musicians — most likely to treasure it.
The song might have stayed buried. It appeared on no Flack studio album of the era, and for decades the only way to hear it was on that old 45 or on later reissues. But songs this well made have a way of travelling. Singers and producers who studied the Flack catalogue — and in the 1970s, everyone studied the Flack catalogue — kept finding it there on the flip side, waiting.
Carried From Voice to Voice
The Three Degrees recorded Trade Winds. Randy Crawford recorded it. Lou Rawls, whose baritone was made for songs of worldly farewell, made it a signature of his own — MacDonald’s biographers list the song as a hit for Rawls. And in 1976 Rod Stewart placed it on A Night on the Town, the blockbuster album that also carried Tonight’s the Night and The First Cut Is the Deepest, introducing the MacDonald–Salter ballad to a rock audience that had never flipped a Roberta Flack single over.
It is a telling list. Trade Winds became the kind of song that singers pass hand to hand — a professional’s song, admired inside the trade long before it was famous outside it. Stewart’s version is instructive: he slows it further, leans on its nautical melancholy, and places it in the company of his own hits without embarrassing it, which for a B-side by two staff songwriters is a remarkable fate. Rawls, who shared MacDonald’s world of supper-club soul and impeccable phrasing, treated it almost as repertoire theatre. Crawford found the jazz in it. Each version confirms what was there from the start: a melody built like a slow tide, and a lyric about the oldest subject in popular song, the lover the sea takes away.
The Writers’ Long Wake
The song’s afterlife is also the story of its writers’ extraordinary decade. Through the 1970s, MacDonald was everywhere at once: a first-call New York session percussionist whose playing decorates records by artists from George Benson to David Bowie, a member of Flack’s touring and recording family, and half of a writing team whose catalogue grew to define sophisticated soul. When he died in December 2011, the obituaries led with Where Is the Love and Just the Two of Us — but musicians kept mentioning Trade Winds, the beautiful one that had started life as a B-side.
Flack outlived them both in the catalogue: she died in February 2025, aged eighty-eight, having accepted a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2020. Her obituaries, like MacDonald’s, led with the No. 1s. The B-side had to wait for the reissue era to get its due.
The B-Side Surfaces
In 2020, the fiftieth-anniversary edition of First Take finally gave Trade Winds an album home, including it among the bonus material alongside Flack’s early demos and single edits. Reviewers of the reissue singled it out — a “memorable” tune, in one assessment, that had been hiding behind her signature hit for nearly fifty years.
There is a neat symmetry in the story. In 1972 the MacDonald–Salter team had two songs in Roberta Flack’s orbit: one, Where Is the Love, won a Grammy and topped the R&B chart; the other rode the B-side of the biggest single of the year into obscurity. Half a century on, both are standards. Trade Winds just took the longer route — which, for a song about slow winds and distant shores, seems exactly right.
It also fits the singer. Flack’s art, from The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face onward, was so often about leave-taking — lovers departing, distances opening, the held breath before a goodbye. The B-side she cut in her first flush of fame turned out to be one of the purest examples of the thing she did best, and the singers who rescued it knew it. Some records are hits. This one was a message in a bottle, and the trade winds did the rest. It stands today as one of the great B-sides of the Atlantic era: five and a half minutes of Roberta Flack, hiding in plain sight on the back of a No. 1.