Roberta Flack, the Grammy-winning singer and pianist whose intimate vocal and musical style on Killing Me Softly With His Song, The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face and other hits made her one of the top recording artists of the 1970s and an influential performer long after, has died aged 88.
She died on at home surrounded by her family, publicist Elaine Schock said in a statement on Monday (early Tuesday AEDT). Flack announced in 2022 she had ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, and could no longer sing.
Little known before her early 30s, Flack became an overnight star after Clint Eastwood used The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face as the soundtrack for one of cinema’s more memorable and explicit love scenes, between the actor and Donna Mills in his 1971 film Play Misty for Me.
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The hushed, hymn-like ballad, with Flack’s graceful soprano afloat on a bed of soft strings and piano, topped the Billboard pop chart in 1972 and received a Grammy for record of the year. In 1973, she matched both achievements with Killing Me Softly, becoming the first artist to win consecutive Grammys for best record.
She was a classically trained pianist discovered in the late 1960s by jazz musician Les McCann, who later wrote that “her voice touched, tapped, trapped, and kicked every emotion I’ve ever known”. Versatile enough to summon the up-tempo gospel passion of Aretha Franklin, Flack often favored a more reflective and measured approach.
For Flack’s many admirers, she was a sophisticated and bold new presence in the music world and in the social and civil rights movements of the time, her friends including the Reverend Jesse Jackson and Angela Davis, whom Flack visited in prison while Davis faced charges — for which she was acquitted — for murder and kidnapping.
Flack sang at the funeral of Jackie Robinson, major league baseball’s first Black player, and was among the many guest performers on the feminist children’s entertainment project created by Marlo Thomas, Free to Be … You and Me.
Flack, the daughter of musicians, was born in Black Mountain, North Carolina, and raised in Arlington, Virginia. A gospel fan as a child, she was so talented a piano player that at age 15 she received a full scholarship to Howard, the historically Black university.
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Flack’s other hits from the 1970s included the cozy Feel Like Makin’ Love and two duets with her close friend and former Howard University classmate Donny Hathaway, Where Is the Love and The Closer I Get to You — a partnership that ended in tragedy. In 1979, she and Hathaway were working on an album of duets when he suffered a breakdown during recording and later that night fell to his death from his hotel room in Manhattan.
“We were deeply connected creatively,” Flack told Vibe in 2022, upon the 50th anniversary of the million-selling Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway album.
“He could play anything, sing anything. Our musical synergy was unlike (anything) I’d had before or since.”
She never matched her first run of success, although she did have a hit in the 1980s with the Peabo Bryson duet Tonight, I Celebrate My Love and in the 1990s with the Maxi Priest duet Set the Night to Music.
In the mid-90s, Flack received new attention after the Fugees recorded a Grammy-winning cover of Killing Me Softly, which she eventually performed on stage with the hip-hop group.
Overall, she won five Grammys (three for Killing Me Softly), was nominated eight other times and was given a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2020, with John Legend and Ariana Grande among those praising her.
“I love that connection to other artists because we understand music, we live music, it’s our language,” Flack told songwriteruniverse.com in 2020.
“Through music we understand what we are thinking and feeling. No matter what challenge life presents, I am at home with my piano, on a stage, with my band, in the studio, listening to music. I can find my way when I hear music.”
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In 2022, Beyoncé placed Flack, Franklin and Diana Ross among others in a special pantheon of heroines name-checked in the Grammy-nominated “Queens Remix” of Break My Soul.
Flack was briefly married to Stephen Novosel, an interracial relationship that led to tension with each of their families, and earlier had a son, the singer and keyboardist Bernard Wright.
For years, she lived in Manhattan’s Dakota apartment building, on the same floor as John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who became a close friend and provided liner notes for a Flack album of Beatles covers, Let It Be Roberta.
She also devoted extensive time to the Roberta Flack School of Music, based in New York and attended mostly by students between ages 6 to 14.
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Flack had taught music in DC-area junior high schools for several years in her 20s, while performing after hours in clubs. She sometimes backed other singers, but her own shows at Washington’s renowned Mr Henry’s attracted such celebrity patrons as Burt Bacharach, Ramsey Lewis and Johnny Mathis. The club’s owner, Henry Yaffe, converted an apartment directly above into a private studio, the Roberta Flack Room.
“I wanted to be successful, a serious all-round musician,” she told The Telegraph in 2015.
“I listened to a lot of Aretha, the Drifters, trying to do some of that myself, playing, teaching.”
Flack was signed to Atlantic Records and her debut album, First Take, a blend of gospel, soul, flamenco and jazz, came out in 1969. One track was a love song by the English folk artist Ewan MacColl: The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, written in 1957 for his future wife, singer Peggy Seeger. Flack not only knew of the ballad, but used it while working with a glee club during her years as an educator.
“I was teaching at Banneker Junior High in Washington, DC. It was part of the city where kids weren’t that privileged, but they were privileged enough to have music education,” she said.
“I really wanted them to read music. First, I’d get their attention. (Flack starts singing a Supremes hit) ‘Stop, in the name of love’. Then I could teach them!” she told the Tampa Bay Times in 2012.
“You have to do all sorts of things when you’re dealing with kids in the inner-city,” she said.
“I knew they’d like the part where (The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face) goes ‘The first time ever I kissed your mouth’. Ooh, ‘Kissed your mouth!’ Once the kids got past the giggles, we were good.”
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