Roberta Flack, Beloved Singer, Pianist, and Educator, Has Died
The acclaimed musician blended classical music with soul, jazz, and folk, resulting in a series of resonant hits including ‘Killing Me Softly With His Song.’
Roberta Flack, the acclaimed singer, pianist, and educator, has died. An official statement said that “She died peacefully surrounded by her family.” In 2022, Flack revealed that she had been diagnosed with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, which left her unable to perform publicly. Flack was 88.
She was born Roberta Cleopatra Flack, in Black Mountain, North Carolina, on February 10, 1937. Flack was raised in Arlington, Virginia by musical parents. “My father found an old, smelly piano in a junkyard and restored it for me and painted it green,” she told Forbes in 2021. “This was my first piano and was the instrument in which I found my expression and inspiration as a young person.” Soon, she was studying classical music and playing the piano in Lomax African Methodist Episcopal Church’s choir. She would regularly visit a local Baptist church, where she absorbed raw gospel performances from locals and legends like Mahalia Jackson and Sam Cooke.
Flack attended Howard University, where she studied music education. She later worked as a schoolteacher in Washington D.C.. On evenings and weekends, she performed at nightclubs, accompanying singers and singing standards. In the late 1960s, the jazz musician Les McCann witnessed one of Flack’s solo sets and helped her arrange an audition with Atlantic Records, who released her debut album, First Take, in 1969. McCann wrote in the album’s liner notes that Flack’s voice touched, tapped, trapped, and kicked every emotion I’ve ever known.” Flack’s records blended her classical piano training with soul, jazz and folk. Her powerful voice infused every song with resonance.
Flack skyrocketed to fame when Clint Eastwood used a track “The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face” to soundtrack a memorable love scene in his 1971 film Play Misty for Me. The track, which appeared on First Take, spent six consecutive weeks at No. 1, was named Billboard’s top song of 1972, and won the Grammy Award for Record of the Year in 1973.
In the early ’70s, Flack began regularly collaborating with her former Howard University classmate, soul artist Donny Hathaway. Together they wrote hits like “Where Is the Love,” which won the Grammy Award for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals.
Flack had two other No. 1 hits in the ’70s. Her 1973 rendition of “Killing Me Softly With His Song” would be her defining track, winning Grammy Awards for Record of the Year and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. It was memorably covered by Fugees in the ’90s, winning even more Grammys. The title track of her self-produced 1975 album Feel Like Makin’ Love was another massive hit.
Flack was also known for her social activism and was involved in the civil rights movement. She befriended Rev. Jesse Jackson and Angela Davis. Flack sang at the funeral of Jackie Robinson, the first African-American to play in Major League Baseball. She was also a guest on the feminist children’s television program Free to Be…You and Me, performing alongside a young Michael Jackson.
Davis once described the soft power of Flack’s voice in regards to protest music: “Yes, we needed the songs that were loud, that convinced us we were doing the right thing, that we needed to keep on pushing. They were incorporated into the soundtrack of the movement. But change happens when people’s emotions are affected. When we begin to be active participants from the heart…. Roberta had brought a kind of reflectiveness, a space to actually think and imagine.”
Later in her career, Flack focused on humanitarian causes. In 2006, she co-founded The Roberta Flack School of Music, which provided free music education to underprivileged students in the Bronx. In 2010, she established the Roberta Flack Foundation, an organization dedicated to music education and animal welfare.
In 2012, Flack released her final album, Let It Be Roberta, reconfigurations of songs by The Beatles. In 2020, the Recording Academy presented Flack with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 62nd Annual GRAMMY Awards ceremony. On May 13, 2023, Flack was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Berklee College of Music.
