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When she was 11 years old and entering the segregated H.B. Sugg School in Farmville in the late ’50s, Alma Hobbs and her classmates were invited by their new music teacher — a classically trained recent Howard University graduate — to audition for the school choir. Hobbs couldn’t know at the time that this teacher, Miss Flack, would go on to become one of the biggest musical stars of the 1970s.

You see, Miss Flack’s first name was Roberta, and in 1972 and 1973, she took the pop world by storm with a pair of gentle, ethereal No. 1 singles, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” and “Killing Me Softly with His Song.” On her albums — from her 1969 debut, First Take, to her final studio release in 2012, Let It Be Roberta: Roberta Flack Sings The Beatles — her crisp, clear, and wistful voice could segue effortlessly from polished classical stylings to warm folk ballads, contemplative jazz, simmering soul, and playful funk. By the time of her death in February at age 88, her angelic voice silenced by ALS, Flack had long been credited with helping introduce a smoother, moodier style of R&B known as Quiet Storm.

But in 1959, she was only known as Miss Flack, the young teacher born in the mountains of western North Carolina and adored by her students in the endlessly flat eastern part of our state. What Hobbs remembers most about her former teacher is her impressive talent, her bright smile, and her willingness to encourage students who may not have been the greatest singers, but who nonetheless had something to offer a choir. “Her philosophy was that everyone does not have to be a singer, but that a choir needs all voices because you’re going to blend together,” Hobbs says. She laughs. “I was one of those voices that blended.”

Flack got the job through a Howard University classmate. The school needed a choir director and contacted Farmville native and H.B. Sugg alumnus Clarence Knight Jr., a saxophonist who later went on to perform with numerous R&B legends like Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and Stevie Wonder, and who was honored for his own achievements last year by the H.B. Sugg Charitable Organization. Knight recommended a few of his peers, including Flack, who ended up living with Knight’s mother during her short tenure in Farmville.

It wasn’t an easy move for the young musician. Flack was a small child when her family relocated from their hometown of Black Mountain to the Washington, D.C., area. What she recalled most about her Southern upbringing was discrimination. Music helped her process her feelings about it. “I found solace and took out my frustrations on the piano,” she once said. “I even recorded a number of North Carolinian folk songs that I learned growing up.”

Hobbs was in college preparing for her own career that eventually led to a lofty position with the U.S. Department of Agriculture when she first heard one of Miss Flack’s hit songs at a party. “It was unbelievable!” she recalls with a cackle. “And, of course, I went and told everyone I knew that I was in Roberta Flack’s choir.”

Decades later, when Flack the legend performed a concert in Washington, D.C., Clarence Knight brought his elderly mother backstage to reconnect with the singer, and the two spent the evening reminiscing about her time in their home. “She was here for just one year,” Hobbs says, “but she made an incredible difference.”

In the Farmville of the 1950s. In the classrooms and hallways of an ordinary all-Black school that laid the foundation for several extraordinary lives.