Barbara Ann Humphrey grew up in Dallas and came out of Lincoln High School in 1968 with both classical and jazz training on the flute, which she continued at Texas Southern University and Southern Methodist University. Dizzy Gillespie heard her at an SMU talent contest and gave her a single piece of advice: go to New York.

She took it in June 1971. She played the Apollo Theater's Amateur Night, and within weeks producer George Butler signed her to Blue Note Records. She was 21, and she was the first female instrumentalist the label had ever put under contract.

Her debut, Flute-In, was recorded on September 30 and October 1, 1971 at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, with Van Gelder himself engineering. Butler surrounded her with players who had nothing to prove: Lee Morgan on trumpet, Billy Harper on tenor, Hank Jones on piano, George Duvivier on bass, and Idris Muhammad on drums, with Wade Marcus arranging. The program mixed Bill Withers' "Ain't No Sunshine" and "Spanish Harlem" with Morgan's own "The Sidewinder." Humphrey played in Morgan's final band that same year. Dig This! followed in 1972, a lusher record with Ron Carter on bass, Alphonse Mouzon on drums, and a string section.

The record that changed her standing arrived in 1973. Blue Note put her together with Larry and Fonce Mizell, the production team that had just built Donald Byrd's Black Byrd into one of the best-selling albums in the label's history. Larry Mizell wrote all six tracks on Blacks and Blues and set them on a rhythm section of Harvey Mason and Chuck Rainey, with Jerry Peters on Fender Rhodes, David T. Walker on guitar, and King Errisson on congas. Humphrey has described the method plainly: the band would play the track and tell her to play to it, with no written melody, so she improvised against the groove on the spot.

Commercially it worked in a way jazz records rarely did. Blacks and Blues reached No. 18 on the R&B chart and No. 84 on the Billboard 200, and it held a chart position for 21 weeks. Its opening track, "Chicago, Damn," went to No. 9 R&B in April 1974. A flute-led Blue Note album had landed on rhythm and blues radio.

Satin Doll, released December 1, 1974 and recorded that July through September at the Sound Factory in Hollywood, went further up the pop chart at No. 30, adding Melvin "Wah Wah" Ragin on guitar and a reading of Stevie Wonder's "You Are the Sunshine of My Life" beside the Ellington title track. In between, Blue Note issued Live at Montreux (1974), where her backing band was the young group that would shortly become The Blackbyrds: Kevin Toney on Rhodes, Barney Perry on guitar, and Keith Killgo on drums. Fancy Dancer, recorded August 5 to 7, 1975, closed the Mizell trilogy and brought harpist Dorothy Ashby into the session.

Billboard named her Best Female Instrumentalist in 1976. That same year she and George Benson both appeared as guests on Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life.

She moved to Epic for Tailor Made (1977), Freestyle (1978), and The Good Life (1979), taking an executive producer credit on the first of them and singing lead as well as playing. The Tailor Made sessions included Bill Summers and a young Sheila Escovedo on percussion.

Then she stepped back from the front of the stage. In 1977 Humphrey founded Innovative Artist Management, and later The Bobbi Humphrey Music Company, which signed a production agreement with Warner Bros. in 1990. She helped launch Tevin Campbell's career. She returned to recording with City Beat on Malaco in 1989, which held a place on Billboard's Black Albums chart for 16 weeks, and in 1994 she founded her own label, Paradise Sounds Records, releasing Passion Flute on it.

While she was running companies, her seventies catalog acquired a second audience she never went looking for. DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince built "A Touch of Jazz" on "Harlem River Drive" in 1987. Eric B. & Rakim, Digable Planets, Mobb Deep, Ice-T, Ghostface Killah, Ludacris, Madlib, and Wiz Khalifa all worked from her records. Guru brought her onto the Jazzmatazz series, and in 2002 Common asked her to play on Electric Circus.

She is 76 and still performs, still carrying the title critics gave her decades ago: the First Lady of the Flute.

Humphrey names Hubert Laws, Herbie Mann, and James Moody as her influences, which places her in the specific lineage of players who insisted the flute could carry a jazz record rather than decorate one. Her early Blue Note work sits closer to Laws: mainstream, technically assured, arranged for a full ensemble.

What separates her is what happened when the Mizells put her over a funk rhythm section. Her tone stayed warm and vocal rather than breathy, and she phrased across the beat instead of riding it, which is why the Mizell records still read as jazz records rather than as instrumental soul. She improvised her lines against finished backing tracks with no written melody in front of her, so the accessibility on those albums lives in the arrangement and the groove, not in the flute part.

She also sings, taking lead vocals on the Epic albums and a solo vocal credit as early as Blacks and Blues, which is unusual for a horn player of her generation and part of why the crossover felt natural rather than imposed.