By Danny R. Johnson – Jazz and Pop Music Critic
Roberta Flack, the renowned singer and pianist who made Grammy history with her sublime No. 1 hits “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” and “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” passed away on Monday in New York at the age of 88.
“We are heartbroken that the glorious Roberta Flack passed away this morning,” according to a statement from her representative. “She died peacefully surrounded by her family. Roberta broke boundaries and records. She was also a proud educator.”
In November 2022, it was revealed that she had been diagnosed with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, and could no longer sing. In 2016, she suffered a stroke and retired from performing two years later.
A native of North Carolina and an accomplished classical pianist, Roberta Flack became the first artist to win the Grammy for Record of the Year in consecutive years with “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” in 1973 and “Killing Me Softly With His Song” in 1974. (U2 and Billie Eilish duplicated the feat in 2001-02 and 2020-21, respectively.)
After working as a teacher and moonlighting as a nightclub singer in Washington, D.C., Flack was signed by Atlantic Records, releasing her debut album, First Take, in 1969, followed by Chapter Two a year later. These albums did not generate significant attention initially.
However, when Clint Eastwood used “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” for his film Play Misty for Me (1971), it was released as a single in February 1972 and quickly climbed to No. 1, spending six weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100. Eastwood paid $1,000 for the rights to the song, according to producer Joel Dorn in the 2022 documentary Roberta.
Flack received a second Grammy in 1973 for “Where Is the Love,” her duet with her college friend and frequent collaborator, the late Donny Hathaway. That song reached No. 5 on the charts.
“Killing Me Softly,” which earned Flack a Grammy for best pop vocal performance, held the No. 1 spot for five weeks in 1973. She topped the charts again in 1974 with “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” which garnered three of her 14 career Grammy nominations.
In 2020, she was honored with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
“I always say that ‘love is a song’ — meaning that music reaches beyond age, race, nationality, and religion to touch our hearts,” she wrote in a 2020 email to NPR’s Ann Powers, who described the artist as “an interpreter as bold and discerning as her role models Nina Simone and Frank Sinatra.”
Roberta Cleopatra Flack, born on February 10, 1937, in Black Mountain, North Carolina, grew up in Arlington, Virginia. Her father, Laron, was a draftsman for the Veterans Administration, and her mother, Irene, served as a church organist.
Flack began taking classical piano lessons, and by the age of 13, she played Handel’s “Messiah” for her church choir. She attended Stevens Elementary School in Washington, Hoffman-Boston High School in Arlington, and won a full musical scholarship to Howard University at 15.
As a child, she created an alter ego, Rubina Flake, a celebrated concert artist who performed at Carnegie Hall. This imaginative persona helped her cope with the challenges faced by talented Black children in the South.
At 19, after her father’s death, she left graduate school at Howard and began working as an English teacher in Farmville, North Carolina, and Washington, D.C. Concurrently, she gave music lessons and performed in nightclubs, notably at Mr. Henry’s in Capitol Hill, where jazz legend Les McCann discovered and signed her to Atlantic Records in 1968.
McCann praised her voice in the liner notes for her album “First Take,” saying, “Her voice touched, tapped, trapped and kicked every emotion I’ve ever known. I laughed, cried, and screamed for more … she alone had the voice.”
At 32, Flack arrived in New York with a repertoire of 600 songs and spent just 10 hours recording her debut album, which included “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” written in 1957 by British singer-songwriter Ewan MacColl and first recorded by his wife, Peggy Seeger, as well as a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.”
In a 2012 interview with The Daytona Beach News-Journal, Flack recounted a memorable conversation with Clint Eastwood, who had heard “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” on the radio during his drive to work:
“I was at home in Virginia with my mother when the phone rang. My mom answered and said, ‘Roberta, it’s Clint Eastwood.’ I thought it was a prank,” she remembered.
“He really surprised me. I didn’t faint, but I nearly did because it was a big deal. The conversation went like this (imitates Eastwood’s voice): ‘I’d like to use your song in this movie I’m doing called Play Misty for Me. It’s about a disc jockey, and it features a lot of music. I’d use it in the only part of the movie where there’s absolute love.’
“I agreed. We discussed payment. I was shocked and nervous but agreed. He asked if there was anything else, and I said, ‘I want to re-record it. It’s too slow.’ He replied, ‘No, it’s not.’”
(Flack later recorded “This Side of Forever,” which played over the closing credits of Eastwood’s 1983 Dirty Harry film, Sudden Impact.)
After releasing the albums Quiet Fire in 1971 and Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway in 1972, she recorded Killing Me Softly in 1973. The title track, co-written and originally recorded by Lori Lieberman, was inspired by a Don McLean concert. Flack first heard it on a cross-country flight as part of the in-flight entertainment.
She continued with 1975’s “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” earning another Record of the Year nomination and becoming the first female vocalist since 1940 to top the chart in three consecutive years. In 1977, she released “Blue Lights in the Basement,” featuring the No. 2 hit “The Closer I Get to You,” another duet with Hathaway.
Following Hathaway’s suicide in 1979, Flack toured with Peabo Bryson, achieving a Top 20 hit in 1983 with “Tonight, I Celebrate My Love.” Another duet, “Set the Night to Music,” with Maxi Priest, reached No. 6 in 1991. She frequently collaborated with Luther Vandross.
In 2012, she released her last album, “Let It Be Roberta: Roberta Flack Sings the Beatles.” Many of her LPs were produced under the name Rubina Flake.
Flack also contributed to television and film, performing “Together Through the Years,” the theme for the 1986-91 NBC-CBS series “Valerie/The Hogan Family”; singing in the choir for “The Wiz” “(1978); and contributing songs to the Richard Pryor movie “Bustin’ Loose” (1981).
She was married to bassist Steve Novosel from 1965 until their divorce in 1972. In the ’80s, she lived in The Dakota in New York, where her neighbors were John Lennon and Yoko Ono; their son Sean Lennon called her “Aunt Roberta.”
The feature-length documentary Roberta debuted in November 2022 at the DOCNYC film festival, and a children’s book she co-wrote, “The Green Piano: How Little Me Found Music,” was released in January 2023.
Her publicist stated she has no survivors. Flack expressed her hope that her story of the first green piano her father got for her from the junkyard would inspire children to reach for their dreams, emphasizing that persistence, encouragement from family and friends, and belief in oneself can make dreams come true.
