By Patricia Reaney
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Roberta Flack, the silky-voiced Grammy-winning singer whose sultry ballads “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” and “Killing Me Softly With His Song” topped the charts in the 1970s, died on Monday at the age of 88, her publicist said.
“We are heartbroken that the glorious Roberta Flack passed away this morning February 24, 2025. She died peacefully surrounded by her family. Roberta broke boundaries and records. She was also a proud educator,” publicist Elaine Schock said in a statement.
The classically trained pianist defied musical genres as she blended aspects of jazz, soul, pop and R&B to create a distinctive style and became one of America’s most influential singers.
Flack revealed in November 2022 that she had been diagnosed with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, and could no longer sing. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is a progressive illness that impacts nerve cells and causes paralysis and death.
The singer won four Grammys and was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2020. She was the first artist to win two consecutive Record of the Year trophies for 1973’s “First Time I Ever Saw Your Face” and 1974’s “Killing Me Softly with His Song.”
“In more than a half-century of making music, she’s established herself as one of the most distinctive song stylists in the pop arena,” National Public Radio said of Flack in 2020.
Flack had several No. 1 hits in the 1970s and produced 20 studio albums. Although she wrote some of her own songs and collaborated on others, she considered herself as an interpreter of the music.
“When Flack sings a song, she caresses each cadence, considering and intensifying them, the better to realize the full meaning of the lyric,” the Guardian newspaper said in 2020.
MUSICAL PRODIGY
Roberta Cleopatra Flack was born on February 10, 1937, in Black Mountain, North Carolina. She was one of four children born into a musical family.
Flack started playing piano when she was nine years old, encouraged by her mother, who was a church organist. She wrote the autobiographical, illustrated children’s book “The Green Piano,” about her first piano, which her father rescued from a junkyard and painted. The book is due to be published in 2023.
The legendary singer finished secondary school at 15 and received a full scholarship to Howard University, where she majored in music. Initially, Flack wanted to be a concert pianist but then studied voice and aspired to be an opera singer.
She gave up her dream of attending graduate school after her father’s death and became a schoolteacher in Washington, D.C.
A perfectionist, Flack taught school during the day and sang in local clubs at night. American jazz musician Les McCann heard her singing at the Mr. Henry club in Washington and helped her sign a contract with Atlantic Records.
As an African American woman growing up in the South, Flack experienced racism and segregation, as well as challenges in the 1970s music industry, which was mostly male-dominated.
Her debut album “First Take” (1969) included the song “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” But the ballad didn’t become a No. 1 hit until actor/director Clint Eastwood heard it on the radio and asked her if he could feature it in his 1971 film “Play Misty for Me.”
Flack scored her second No. 1 hit in 1973 with “Killing Me Softly with His Song,” and her third the following year with “Feel Like Making Love.”
She also collaborated with other artists, including Peabo Bryson, author Maya Angelou and Donny Hathaway. Their single “Where is the Love” was a top 10 hit and earned a Grammy for best pop performance by a duo in 1973. The pair also recorded other songs, including “The Closer I Get to You.”
“A great collaboration is one in which the combination of two talents creates something unique and meaningful that neither could have without the other,” Flack told Forbes in 2021.
The celebrated singer toured with jazz trumpeter Miles Davis in the 1980s and performed for the late South African President Nelson Mandela in 1999. The same year she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
She worked with the Alvin Ailey Dance Company and performed with the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra.
Flack, who was an inspiration for other artists, produced and arranged her own music and worked on scores for films and television. The singer released the soundtrack album for the 1981 Richard Pryor film “Bustin’ Loose.”
In 2006, she established the Roberta Flack School of Music at the Hyde Leadership Charter School in New York to provide music education for children. The Roberta Flack Foundation, which she founded in 2019, also supports music and animal welfare.
Flack married jazz bassist Steve Novosel in 1966. They divorced in 1972.
After suffering from a stroke in 2016, she gave up touring two years later. A PBS documentary about her life, “American Masters: Roberta Flack,” was released in January 2023.
“I’ve always tried to express myself musically from a place of complete honesty in the hope that each person can find his or her own story when they listen in a way that helps them to feel their own truth,” she told Forbes.
(Additional reporting by Brendan O’Brien; Editing by Diane Craft and Alistair Bell)
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