A favorite to all who knew her music, 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 recordings artists of the 1970s and an influential performer long after, died Monday. She was 88.
She died at home surrounded by her family, publicist Elaine Schock said in a statement. 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.” 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.
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 Rev. 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.”
Roberta Cleopatra 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.
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.
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. Such a powerful voice for years, most all urban radio stations should pay tribute to Roberta. Our thoughts and prayers are with her family.
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