Roberta Flack, Grammy-winning singer of ‘Killing Me Softly,’ dies at 88 – National

Roberta Flack, the Grammy-winning singer and pianist whose intimate vocal and musical model on Killing Me Softly with His Song, The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face and different hits 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 stated in a press release. Flack introduced in 2022 she had ALS, generally often called Lou Gehrig’s illness, and may now not sing.

Little recognized earlier than her early 30s, Flack grew to become an in a single day star after Clint Eastwood used The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face because the soundtrack for certainly one of cinema’s extra memorable and express love scenes, between the actor and Donna Mills in his 1971 movie Play Misty for Me. The hushed, hymn-like ballad, with Flack’s sleek soprano afloat on a mattress of soppy strings and piano, topped the Billboard pop chart in 1972 and acquired a Grammy for report of the 12 months. In 1973, she matched each achievements with Killing Me Softly, changing into the primary artist to win consecutive Grammys for greatest report.

She was a classically educated pianist found within the late Sixties by jazz musician Les McCann, who later wrote that “her voice touched, tapped, trapped, and kicked every emotion I’ve ever known.” Versatile sufficient to summon the up-tempo gospel ardour of Aretha Franklin, Flack usually favoured a extra reflective and measured strategy.

For Flack’s many admirers, she was a complicated and daring new presence within the music world and within the social and civil rights actions of the time, her buddies together with the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Angela Davis, whom Flack visited in jail whereas Davis confronted fees — for which she was acquitted — of homicide and kidnapping. Flack sang on the funeral of Jackie Robinson, Major 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.

Get each day National information

Get the day’s prime information, political, financial, and present affairs headlines, delivered to your inbox as soon as a day.

Roberta Cleopatra Flack, the daughter of musicians, was born in Black Mountain, N.C., and raised in Arlington, Va. A gospel fan as a baby, she was so gifted a piano participant that at age 15 she acquired a full scholarship to Howard, the traditionally Black college.

Flack’s different hits from the Seventies included the comfy Feel Like Makin’ Love and two duets together with her shut good friend and former Howard University classmate Donny Hathaway, Where Is the Love and The Closer 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 night time fell to his demise from his lodge 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 Nineteen Eighties with the Peabo Bryson duet Tonight, I Celebrate My Love and within the Nineteen Nineties with the Maxi Priest duet Set the Night to Music. In the mid-’90s, Flack acquired new consideration after the Fugees recorded a Grammy-winning cowl of Killing Me Softly, which she finally carried out on stage with the hip-hop group.

Overall, she gained 5 Grammys (three for Killing Me Softly), was nominated eight different occasions 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 house constructing, on the identical ground as John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who grew to become an in depth good friend and offered liner notes for a Flack album of Beatles covers, Let It Be Roberta. She additionally devoted in depth time to the Roberta Flack School of Music, based mostly in New York and attended principally by college students between ages six and 14.

Flack had 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 typically 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 house instantly 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 Records and her debut album, First Take, a mix of gospel, soul, flamenco and jazz, got here out in 1969. One observe was a love track by the English people 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 Times in 2012.

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