Roberta Flack, Grammy-winning ‘Killing Me Softly’ singer with an intimate model, dies at 88

By HILLEL ITALIE | Related Press

NEW YORK — Roberta Flack, the Grammy-winning singer and pianist whose intimate vocal and musical model made her one of many prime recordings artists of the Seventies and an influential performer lengthy after, died Monday. She was 88.

She died at dwelling surrounded by her household, publicist Elaine Schock mentioned in a press release. Flack introduced in 2022 she had ALS, generally often known as Lou Gehrig’s illness, and will now not sing,

“The record label wanted to have it re-recorded with a faster tempo, but he said he wanted it exactly as it was,” Flack informed The Related Press in 2018. “With the song as a theme song for his movie, it gained a lot of popularity and then took off.”

In 1973, she matched each achievements with “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” turning into the primary artist to win consecutive Grammys for greatest report.

A classically educated pianist so gifted she acquired a full scholarship at age 15 to Howard, the traditionally Black college, Flack was found within the late Nineteen Sixties by jazz musician Les McCann, who later wrote that “her voice touched, tapped, trapped, and kicked every emotion I’ve ever known.” Flack was versatile sufficient to summon the up-tempo gospel ardour of Aretha Franklin, however she favored a extra measured and reflective strategy, as if curating a music phrase by phrase.

For Flack’s many admirers, she was a classy and daring new presence within the music world and within the social and civil rights actions of the time, her pals together with the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Angela Davis, whom Flack visited in jail whereas Davis confronted expenses — for which she was acquitted — for homicide and kidnapping. Flack sang on the funeral of Jackie Robinson, main league baseball’s first Black participant, and was among the many many visitor performers on the feminist kids’s leisure mission created by Marlo Thomas, “Free to Be … You and Me.”

Flack’s different hits from the Seventies included the comfy “Feel Like Makin’ Love” and two duets along with her shut pal and former Howard classmate Donny Hathaway, “Where Is the Love” and ”The Nearer I Get to You” — a partnership that resulted in tragedy. In 1979, she and Hathaway have been engaged on an album of duets when he suffered a breakdown throughout recording and later that evening fell to his loss of life from his resort room in Manhattan.

“We were deeply connected creatively,” Flack informed Vibe in 2022, upon the fiftieth 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 by no means matched her first run of success, though she did have a success within the Eighties with the Peabo Bryson duet “Tonight, I Celebrate My Love” and within the Nineties with the Maxi Priest duet “Set the Night to Music.” Within the mid-90s, Flack acquired new consideration after the Fugees recorded a Grammy-winning cowl of “Killing Me Softly,” which she ultimately carried out on stage with the hip-hop group.

General, she received 5 Grammys (three for “Killing Me Softly”), was nominated eight different instances and was given a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2020, with John Legend and Ariana Grande amongst these praising her.

“I love that connection to other artists because we understand music, we live music, it’s our language,” Flack informed 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.”

In 2022, Beyoncé positioned Flack, Franklin and Diana Ross amongst others in a particular pantheon of heroines name-checked within the Grammy-nominated “Queens Remix” of “Break My Soul.”

Flack was briefly married to Stephen Novosel, an interracial relationship that led to stress with every of their households, and earlier had a son, the singer and keyboardist Bernard Wright. For years, she lived in Manhattan’s Dakota condo constructing, on the identical flooring as John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who turned an in depth pal and supplied liner notes for a Flack album of Beatles covers, “Let It Be Roberta.” She additionally devoted in depth time to the Roberta Flack Faculty of Music, based mostly in New York and attended largely by college students between ages 6 to 14.

Roberta Cleopatra Flack, the daughter of musicians, was born in Black Mountain, North Carolina, and raised in Arlington, Virginia. After graduating from Howard, she taught music in D.C.-area junior excessive faculties for a number of years in her 20s, whereas performing after hours in golf equipment.

She generally backed different singers, however her personal reveals at Washington’s famend Mr. Henry’s attracted such superstar patrons as Burt Bacharach, Ramsey Lewis and Johnny Mathis. The membership’s proprietor, Henry Yaffe, transformed an condo straight above into a non-public studio, the Roberta Flack Room.

“I wanted to be successful, a serious all-round musician,” she informed 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 Data and her debut album, “First Take,” a mix of gospel, soul, flamenco and jazz, got here out in 1969. One monitor was a love music by the English folks artist Ewan MacColl: “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” written in 1957 for his future spouse, singer Peggy Seeger. Flack not solely knew of the ballad, however used it whereas working with a glee membership throughout her years as an educator.

“I was teaching at Banneker Junior High in Washington, D.C. It was part of the city where kids weren’t that privileged, but they were privileged enough to have music education. 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 informed the Tampa Bay Instances in 2012.

“You have to do all sorts of things when you’re dealing with kids in the inner-city,” she mentioned. “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.”

Initially Revealed: February 24, 2025 at 9:39 AM PST