Grammy Award winner Roberta Flack, whose tranquil ballads and 1970s songs such as “Killing Me Softly With His Song” and “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” established her as a timeless R&B singer and songwriter, died Monday. She was 88.
Flack’s death was announced by a spokesperson, who said she “died peacefully surrounded by her family”; the statement didn’t say where she died. Flack suffered a stroke in 2016 and two years later collapsed during a concert, which forced her to use a wheelchair. In 2022, she was diagnosed with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, which took her ability to sing.
A classically trained musician, Flack ushered in an enduring style of rhythm and blues with her early classics that she often described as “scientific soul” — a blend of talent, taste and endless practice. Her recording career included nearly two dozen albums, eight Billboard-charting songs and four Grammy Awards, among numerous nominations. She called herself “just a little country girl” who worked hard at being a musician, without relying on glamour.
“I made it 100% on music,” she said.
Even that was an understatement. The Rev. Jesse Jackson described Flack as “socially relevant and politically unafraid.” The Washington Post said she “embodied the Quiet Storm a full decade before it became a successful radio format,” and NPR credited her with being one of the “prime revisionists of the American songbook.”
“I don’t want to be just the standard kind of commercial artist,” she told The Times in 1973. “The thing that really makes you successful is your dedication to your art.”
With a high, crystal-clear voice, Flack excelled on simple ballads backed by minimal instrumentation. Her music credentials were impeccable: She was a pianist and child prodigy who received a full music scholarship to Howard University at 15. And she became the first solo artist to win consecutive Grammy Awards for record of the year.
Still, she was often undervalued by legacy institutions and under-appreciated in pop music, despite the Fugees’ hit 1996 cover of “Killing Me Softly” on their multiplatinum-selling album “The Score.” It wasn’t until 2020 that Flack finally received the Recording Academy’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
“I think everything you do as a Black person in this country represents a struggle for survival,” she told NPR in 2020.
As a child, Flack aspired to be an opera singer or concert pianist and dreamed of playing Carnegie Hall, a dream that eventually came true.
Her slower tunes exhibited a dreamy, romantic appeal that allowed listeners to focus on her messages. She believed her best songs told stories that struck a chord with listeners. She sang about civil rights at Jackie Robinson’s funeral and love at benefit concerts for AIDS research and inner-city education projects.
Early in her career, she taught music to grade-schoolers and was discovered while moonlighting in a D.C. nightclub. Her career took off in 1970 when she was the sole guest on a Bill Cosby TV special. The next year she released “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” which incubated for two years before winning a Grammy and catching the ear of actor-director Clint Eastwood, who used it in the soundtrack for “Play Misty for Me.”
Flack’s partnership with the late Donny Hathaway in the ’70s yielded some of her most memorable work, including “You’ve Got a Friend,” “Where is the Love” and “The Closer I Get to You.” They also recorded soulful covers of “I (Who Have Nothing)” and the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” and recorded the smoky “Be Real Black For Me,” which became an anthem of affirmation and tolerance among listeners. Hathaway died in 1979 after a fall from a hotel room window. His death was ruled a suicide.
Her 1980 album, “Roberta Flack Featuring Donny Hathaway,” earned two Grammy Award nominations, one for female R&B vocal performance and another for the single “Back Together Again.”
Flack’s emotional maturity helped expand the contemporary definitions of Black music and brought in a feminine perspective that helped plant the seed for artists such as Lauryn Hill, Alicia Keys and India Arie. Music critics said Flack possessed the same intelligence and sophistication for Black women that Joni Mitchell had for white women.
Born Roberta Cleopatra Flack on Feb. 10, 1937, in tiny Black Mountain, N.C., she was the daughter of Laron LeRoy, a draftsman who played piano, and Irene Flack, a church choir organist. She started playing piano by ear when she was 4 and before long was studying the work of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin and Schumann.
Flack considered herself an overachiever, a stubborn perfectionist and was given to self-reflection. She invented a fantasy alter ego as a child — Rubina Flake — to overcome her timid nature. She performed at local churches and won second place in a statewide contest with a Scarlatti sonata at age 13.
“I was a very serious little student. The contest made me feel like a real virtuoso,” she told The Times in 1970.
She attended the only high school available to Black children in Arlington, Va., where the family had moved. Flack was awarded a full music scholarship to Howard in Washington, D.C., where she studied piano before changing her major to music education.
She was open about her lifelong body-image struggles that made her resist being photographed and at times undermined her self-confidence. It also affected her shows, which she kept simple with few theatrics and minimal razzle-dazzle.
“I have to work much, much harder to please an audience because the music is all I have… If I was Diana Ross’ size I wouldn’t mind getting a little friskier onstage,” she told The Times in 1978.
Roberta Flack in 2017.
(Charles Sykes / Invision/AP)
She graduated from Howard at 19 and landed her first job teaching English literature in Farmville, N.C., before moving to Washington where she could teach and spend evenings performing at nightclubs, even though it violated school district rules.
“I started singing things that I had been singing to the kids,” she said on NPR in 2006. “Like, I really taught ‘First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ to my junior high school girls’ glee club to get their attention. By the time we got to [singing] ‘the first time ever I kissed your mouth,’ oh my, girl, I had ‘em.‘”
Flack said she had to muster her courage to leave the safety of the classroom for the stage. For a Black artist in those days, she said, “you had to have a lot of heart and a strong desire to do that.”
She was first spotted by soul-jazz icon Les McCann, who saw her at a benefit concert in the summer of 1968 and was so impressed he sent a tape to an associate at Atlantic Records, where she recorded her debut album, “First Take,” in just 10 hours. It included “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.”
In the record’s liner notes, McCann wrote: “Roberta possesses, both as a singer and pianist, that rare quality which carries the listener beyond every barrier as though it never existed, to that level at which all humans can truly hear.”
In her early days, critics compared Flack to Nina Simone, Nancy Wilson, Odetta and even Judy Garland: “As long as there’s so much disagreement about who I sound like, I know I must have a style of my own,” she told The Times in 1970 after the release of her sophomore album, “Chapter Two.”
She was uniquely herself.
In 1972, she finally made good on that dream to appear at Carnegie Hall, where she once wanted to play Schumann, Bach and Chopin. But it was her own music she played.
Her sweet ballads fooled many into thinking she was fragile and demure. But Flack was an “aggressive, articulate, exceptionally intelligent woman who is fighting that fragile image,” The Times wrote in a 1975 assessment of her career.
“If I flex a little mental muscle, a lot of people put their defenses up. Some people think that if you’re a performer you’re dumb or if you’re a woman you’re dumb or, particularly if you’re a Black woman, you’re dumb. I have to deal with these reactions a lot and I’m really fed up with it,” she told The Times. “I could downplay my intelligence but I’ll be damned if I will ever do that.”
For a long stretch of her career, Flack produced her own albums, including 1975’s “Feel Like Makin’ Love” and 1977’s “Blue Lights in the Basement,” using the pseudonym Rubina Flake as a joke. At the time, Black women record producers — even stars like her — were exceptionally rare.
Still, Flack would make the creative decisions, choose her own material, arranger and show up for mixing and overdubbing sessions. “I’m a disciplined, meticulous musician. I was trained in classical music so I’m used to practicing something a long, long time before I do it,” she explained. “Some people make an album in a week, but it usually sounds like it was done in a week.”
After Hathaway’s death, she frequently paired with complementary singer Peabo Bryson, first on their “Live & More” album in 1980, then “Born to Love” in 1983 and on a number of tours thereafter.
As her career matured, Flack’s oldies eclipsed her newer material, often described by critics as “turgid and bland.” Critics were particularly harsh in their reviews of her 1991 album “Set the Night to Music,” which included a duet with Maxi Priest on the title song, despite it being a huge hit.
Her 1994 record “Roberta” — boasting covers of well-known pop and jazz songs — moved away from the techno-R&B formulas that she felt no longer suited her and toward another Grammy Award nomination. In 2012, she released “Let It Be Roberta,” a cover collection of Beatles songs.
When she retired from touring, she continued to practice weekly with her musical director and vocal coach as she worked on a documentary film, a biography and a children’s book, “The Green Piano,” which was based on her life. Her marriage to jazz bassist Steve Novosel yielded a son, but ended in divorce.
She also founded the Roberta Flack School of Music at the Hyde Leadership Charter School in the Bronx to provide a free music education program to underprivileged students. In 2010 she founded the Roberta Flack Foundation to support animal welfare and music education.
“I am a person who has managed to last because I have chosen to stay true to my own ideals and principles, and true to my own experience,” she told the Washington Post in 1989. “I am a Black person who sings the way I do. I am not a Black person who sounds anything like Aretha Franklin or anything like Chaka Khan. I know what I am and I don’t want to, and I shouldn’t have to, change in order to be who I am.”
