Rochelle Fleming, First Choice lead singer, dies at 72

Rochelle Fleming, the lead singer of the Philadelphia vocal group First Choice whose voice powered the disco anthem “Let No Man Put Asunder,” died Nov. 5 at 72.

Her death was announced Nov. 7 on her Facebook page by her manager, George Iz Correia, SoulTracks reported. “She brought light, laughter and love to the world,” Correia wrote.

Fleming was never a household name, but her voice runs through nearly 50 years of dance music. First Choice’s recordings became source material for the house and techno producers who built the next two decades of club music on top of Philadelphia disco, and the group’s 1977 track “Let No Man Put Asunder” still plays in clubs. Her death sent fans and DJs back to the catalog, which is why her name is trending four days after she died.

A Philadelphia native, Fleming began singing at Overbrook High School with Annette Guest and Wardell Piper in a group originally called the Debonettes. With help from radio personality Georgie Woods, the singers connected with producer Norman Harris and songwriter Allan Felder, renamed themselves First Choice and became part of the Philly Soul movement, according to the group’s biography. Philadelphia in the early 1970s was producing soul records with string arrangements and tight rhythm sections that sat between Motown’s polish and the harder funk coming out of Memphis, and First Choice cut their records in that tradition.

The group broke through nationally in 1973 with “Armed and Extremely Dangerous,” which reached No. 11 on the R&B chart, the Top 30 on the pop chart and the Top 20 in the UK. “Smarty Pants” followed, reaching No. 9 in the UK, and “The Player (Part 1)” peaked at No. 7 on the R&B chart. The trio appeared on “Soul Train” and “American Bandstand.”

The lineup changed around Fleming. Piper left for a solo career before the first album was released and was replaced by Joyce Jones, who was later replaced by Ursula Herring, who was later replaced by Debbie Martin. Fleming stayed. The group moved from Philly Groove to Warner Bros. to Gold Mind to Salsoul, and the hits kept coming: “Doctor Love,” which reached No. 8 on the dance chart in 1977, “Love Thang,” “Double Cross” and “Hold Your Horses.” The 1977 album “Delusions,” recorded for Gold Mind, is the record AllMusic critic Ed Hogan regarded as the trio’s best, according to the group’s AllMusic biography.

First Choice disbanded in 1980. Three years later, Salsoul released “Let No Man Put Asunder,” a track from “Delusions,” as a single. It rose to No. 13 on the Billboard dance chart and became the group’s signature song. The track found a second life when house producers in Chicago and New York built a genre partly out of Salsoul’s catalog. Todd Terry and the Jungle Brothers sampled First Choice. Mary J. Blige covered “Let No Man Put Asunder” on her 1999 album “Mary.” In 2019, J. Cole sampled the group’s “Wake Up to Me” in “Middle Child.”

After the breakup, Fleming continued recording and performing internationally as a solo artist, releasing dance singles including “Love Itch,” “Danger!” and “Suffer the Consequences.” First Choice reunited for a concert at the East River Bandshell in New York on Aug. 6, 2014, with the original members including Fleming. The group now performs without her, under the name The First Choice, with Guest and Herring and Andre Jackson carrying the catalog forward.

Fleming’s death comes a week after her former bandmate Wardell Piper released the single “Anywhere” to positive notices, SoulTracks noted. The timing put the group back in the news twice in the same week.

The trend is doing what trends do: compressing a career into a single song. Most of the people searching Fleming’s name this weekend are looking up “Let No Man Put Asunder,” which is the right song to look up but the wrong place to stop. The First Choice catalog runs from 1973 to 1980, six albums, and the best of it is the work Fleming did with Harris on “Delusions” and “Hold Your Horses,” where the Philadelphia string arrangements and her voice were matched to dance-floor rhythms that still sound current. The singles that charted in 1973 and 1974 are the ones that made the group’s name, but the dance tracks from the late 1970s are the ones that kept it.

Fleming was 72. The cause of death has not been publicly disclosed beyond the announcement on her Facebook page. She is identified in the SoulTracks obituary as Rochelle Fleming-Finney.

What I think

The obituary headline writes itself: disco legend dies. The problem with that headline is that it files Fleming under a genre and a decade and lets the reader move on. She was a lead singer in a working group that toured, changed labels four times, replaced three members and kept recording for a decade. That is a career, not a genre.

The other problem is the sampling story, which is true but has a way of crediting the producers who used the records over the woman who made them. Todd Terry did not write “Let No Man Put Asunder.” J. Cole did not write “Wake Up to Me.” Fleming and First Choice did, with Harris and Felder, and the reason those samples work is the vocal. Strip the vocal out and you have a loop. Leave it in and you have a song.

She spent the last decades of her life outside the spotlight that found her records anyway. The records kept circulating, kept getting remixed, kept getting sampled, kept getting played, and the woman who sang them kept performing internationally on a smaller scale. That is the deal that disco-era lead singers got. The music never left the clubs. The singers often left the charts. Fleming’s death is a reminder that the voices on those records belonged to people, and most of them are gone or older than anyone expects, and the right response is to listen to the whole catalog before the trend moves on.