Roberta Flack, the legendary singer known for her heartfelt ballads, has died at 88.
Roberta Flack, who has died aged 88, redefined soul music with hits like The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face and Killing Me Softly with His Song.
Both songs reached No 1 in the US and won consecutive Grammys, a feat matched only by U2 and Billie Eilish.
Flack’s career began after being discovered by jazz pianist Les McCann, leading to a successful debut album and widespread acclaim.
Roberta Flack, who has died aged 88, redefined the possibilities of soul music in the 1970s, notably with her languorous singing of the ballads The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face (a hit in 1972) and Killing Me Softly with His Song (1973).
Both hits reached No 1 in America and won consecutive Grammys as Record of the Year, the first time that feat had been achieved and one since matched only by U2 and Billie Eilish.
While she was hailed by many critics as the heir to Aretha Franklin and Nina Simone, Flack’s style was very different from their impassioned deliveries. While hers was warm, it was also exquisitely delicate and considered, the tempo often slower, each syllable seemingly embraced by her voice before being released into the world.
Those used to more politically tinged soul accused her of being bland, middle of the road, but this was to overlook the sincerity of her interpretation and the melancholy that frequently underpinned it. “Aretha makes you sweat,” observed Dionne Warwick. “Roberta makes you think.”
Fame came comparatively late for Flack. At 30, she was teaching music and singing in the evenings at a restaurant in Washington. Her performances had attracted compliments from the likes of Burt Bacharach and Woody Allen, but she only got her break in 1968 after being seen at a fundraising concert for a children’s library by the jazz pianist Les McCann.
Roberta Flack in 2022. Photo / Getty Images
“Her voice touched, tapped, trapped and kicked every emotion I’ve ever known,” he said. “I laughed, cried and screamed for more.” He arranged an audition for her with Atlantic Records, at which she sang 42 songs in three hours. She recorded her debut album, First Time (1969), in a day.
Both it and the follow-up, Chapter Two (1972), were considerable successes, and Downbeat magazine voted Flack its No 1 Vocalist, the first time in 18 years that title had not gone to Ella Fitzgerald. Appearances at the Montreux and Newport festivals followed, as well as at the Soul to Soul concert in Ghana, alongside Ike and Tina Turner and Wilson Pickett.
Wider recognition did not come, however, until Clint Eastwood featured The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face at length in a thriller he had directed, Play Misty for Me (1971). Originally written by the English folk singer Ewan MacColl, the track had featured on First Take, but Flack had stubbornly ignored her producer’s advice that it would be a hit if she sped up her version of it.
Released as a single by Atlantic, it spent six weeks at No 1 (although only reaching No 14 in the UK) and was the biggest-selling record of the year. Roberta Flack capped this a year later with Killing Me Softly, a cover of a song by Lori Lieberman which she had been inspired to write by a Don McLean concert. It reached No 1 in 20 countries (No 6 in the UK) and brought Roberta Flack two Grammys. A hip-hop version by the Fugees became a global smash in 1997.
Flack won a fourth Grammy for Where Is the Love? (1972), a duet with her former university contemporary, Donny Hathaway, who had sung backing vocals on Killing Me Softly.
In 1974 she scored her third US No 1 with Feel Like Makin’ Love, taken from the album of the same title and released under the name Rubina Flake, a childhood alter ego and a signal that she had wearied of giving fans and the industry just what they wanted. Her own favourite among her albums, Blue Lights in the Basement, also went gold, in 1977, and by the early 1980s she had sold seven million records in the US alone.
A studio headshot portrait of Roberta Flack from 1969. Photo / Getty Images
One of four children, Roberta Cleopatra Flack was born on February 10, 1937, in Black Mountain, North Carolina. Her father Laron, whose own father had been a white German immigrant, worked as a draughtsman for the Veterans Administration after the family moved to Arlington, Virginia, on the edge of Washington, when Roberta was 5.
Her mother Irene worked as a cleaner in a school and played organ on Sundays. The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church was to play an important part in shaping Roberta’s sense of music, as its traditions were closer to the Anglican one of quieter, more contemplative hymns than those of many gospel congregations.
Roberta would, however, sometimes venture to a neighbouring Baptist church, where she heard the likes of Sam Cooke and Mahalia Jackson sing. Her father had taught himself to play the piano and he rescued an upright instrument from a junkyard, painting it lime green.
Roberta Flack at Ronnie Scott's, Soho, London, in 1972. Photo / Getty Images
Sitting on her mother’s lap, Roberta learnt to pick out the notes, and to ignore the stench from the rat urine that had soaked the keys. She began formal lessons aged 9, coming second in a statewide competition, and at 15 was awarded a music scholarship by Howard University in Washington.
There, she changed to studying voice. She also began to direct, gaining a standing ovation from the faculty for her production of Aida. Flack intended to do postgraduate work, but the death of her father forced her to begin teaching, initially in a school for white children in Maryland where she was pelted with apples.
She subsequently taught in a black school, where students in the top years were in their 20s, as many still interrupted their education to help with the harvest. Although hired to teach music, she found herself mostly teaching English.
For most of the next decade she continued teaching while playing clubs in the evening. At first she stuck to the classical repertoire, sometimes accompanied by opera singers, but turned to a more pop style after her vocal coach overheard her singing a Christmas tune and encouraged her to switch.
Although Flack insisted that “there is no colour to my music”, she was, while not a standard-bearer for the civil rights movement, identified with its causes at the time she came to prominence. Known for her sometimes forthright self-confidence and independence of mind, as well as for an absence of vices, bar smoking, her view stemmed in part from prejudice she had experienced in the record industry, and in her personal life.
In 1966, she married a white jazz bassist Steve Novosel. His family objected to the marriage and her brother refused to give her away, even though, as she pointed out, their grandfather had been white. She and Novosel were divorced in 1972. They had no children.
“It’s a hard business,” Flack said to the Daily Telegraph in 2015 of the music industry. “But man or woman, you face difficulties in life. The song is the telling factor – if it catches you deeply, you hang on to that feeling.”
While her chart success peaked in the mid-1970s, she continued to release records regularly thereafter. The suicide in 1979 of Hathaway, who was schizophrenic, deprived her of her closest collaborator.
Nevertheless, she worked with Elton John and Michael Jackson – she was the voice of his mother on the promotional video for Bad – and in 1983 duetted with Peabo Bryson on Tonight I Celebrate My Love. That got to No 2 in Britain and 16 in America. Her last major hit there came in 1991, when Set the Night to Music, recorded with Maxi Priest, reached No 6.
Thereafter she toured and occasionally recorded LPs, including an album of Beatles covers, Let It Be Roberta (2012). In the 1980s she had lived on the same corridor as John Lennon and Yoko Ono in the Dakota Building in New York.
For a decade, with additional funds from Prince, she funded a music school in the Bronx. But in 2018 she had a stroke while on stage at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem, and in 2022 was diagnosed as having ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), which made it impossible for her to sing any longer. She published a memoir of her journey to music, The Green Piano, in 2023.
“Music is a big wide area,” she reflected in her interview with the Telegraph. “It covers elements of soul in a very unique way, but now, we are living in a time when music is more soulfully performed by everybody.
“There’s very little difference in black music and white music – it’s a good time and a good space for how music is interpreted. Nowadays, everybody has a licence to like what they like.”
Roberta Flack, born February 10, 1937, died February 24, 2025.
