section_path: Early life and education
section_name: Early life and education
paragraph_text: Early life and education
  
  Flack was born on February 10, 1937, in Black Mountain, North Carolina, to parents Laron Flack, a jazz pianist and U.S. Veterans Administration draftsman, and Irene (née Council) Flack a church organist, choir director and music teacher. According to DNA analysis, Flack was of Cameroonian descent. Her family moved to Richmond, Virginia, before settling in Arlington, Virginia, when she was five years old.
  
  Her first musical experiences were in church. She grew up in a large musical family and often provided piano accompaniment for the choir of Lomax African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church singing hymns and spirituals. She occasionally sang at the Macedonia Baptist Church in Arlington. Her father acquired a battered old piano for her, which she learned to play sitting on her mother's lap. and Flack took formal piano lessons when she was nine. She gravitated towards classical music and during her early teens excelled at classical piano, finishing second in a statewide competition for Black students aged 13 playing a Scarlatti sonata. In 1952 at the age of 15 she won a full music scholarship to Howard University in Washington DC, and was one of the youngest students ever to enroll there. She eventually changed her major from piano to voice and became assistant conductor of the university choir. Her direction of a production of Giuseppe Verdi 's opera Aida received a standing ovation from the Howard University faculty. At Howard she met her future collaborator, Donny Hathaway.
  
  Flack became a student teacher at a school near Chevy Chase, Maryland. She graduated from Howard University at 19 and began graduate studies in music there, but after the sudden death of her father she had to find work to support herself. She took a job teaching music and English at a small, segregated high school in Farmville, North Carolina, for which she was paid $2,800 a year.
  
  Flack was born on February 10, 1937, in Black Mountain, North Carolina, to parents Laron Flack, a jazz pianist and U.S. Veterans Administration draftsman, and Irene (née Council) Flack a church organist, choir director and music teacher. According to DNA analysis, Flack was of Cameroonian descent. Her family moved to Richmond, Virginia, before settling in Arlington, Virginia, when she was five years old.
  
  Her first musical experiences were in church. She grew up in a large musical family and often provided piano accompaniment for the choir of Lomax African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church singing hymns and spirituals. She occasionally sang at the Macedonia Baptist Church in Arlington. Her father acquired a battered old piano for her, which she learned to play sitting on her mother's lap. and Flack took formal piano lessons when she was nine. She gravitated towards classical music and during her early teens excelled at classical piano, finishing second in a statewide competition for Black students aged 13 playing a Scarlatti sonata. In 1952 at the age of 15 she won a full music scholarship to Howard University in Washington DC, and was one of the youngest students ever to enroll there. She eventually changed her major from piano to voice and became assistant conductor of the university choir. Her direction of a production of Giuseppe Verdi 's opera Aida received a standing ovation from the Howard University faculty. At Howard she met her future collaborator, Donny Hathaway.
  
  Flack became a student teacher at a school near Chevy Chase, Maryland. She graduated from Howard University at 19 and began graduate studies in music there, but after the sudden death of her father she had to find work to support herself. She took a job teaching music and English at a small, segregated high school in Farmville, North Carolina, for which she was paid $2,800 a year.