Roberta Flack, the singer and musician known for her chart-topping recordings of songs such as “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” and “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” has died, according to her manager Suzanne Koga. She was 88.
A classically trained pianist, Flack was born in Black Mountain, North Carolina, in 1937 and raised in Arlington, Virginia. She worked as a schoolteacher before launching her professional music career as an accompanist in the Washington, DC, area. With time, however, she began to perform her own sets and expand her mostly classical repertoire to include more pop and jazz sounds.
Flack established an international reputation after Ewan MacColl’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” a song on her first album, First Take—released by Atlantic Records in 1969—was used in Clint Eastwood’s 1971 film Play Misty for Me. The track would help First Take reach number one on the Billboard charts in 1972 and win Flack the Grammy Award for record of the year in 1973.
“Like a healing blanket to wrap yourself up in, Roberta Flack’s rich and sensuous blue-blue sound is currently cresting the peak which began in 1969 when she recorded ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,’” Vogue reported in a short feature on Flack published in June 1973. “The woman behind the powerful piano and the warm, supple voice has a strong, warm, down-home presence which is uniquely American. Her music soars beyond age barriers to appeal to teenagers and to dowagers.”
She would go on to win record of the year again in 1974 for her rendition of “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” a song composed by Charles Fox with lyrics by Norman Gimbel and Lori Lieberman.
It was also in 1972 that Flack started collaborating with singer and keyboardist Donny Hathaway. Together, the pair would release several popular duets during that decade, including 1972’s “Where Is the Love” and 1978’s “The Closer I Get to You,” before Hathaway’s death in 1979. Later, in the 1980s, Flack recorded with the singer and songwriter Peabo Bryson; their 1983 duet “Tonight, I Celebrate My Love” reached as high as number five on Billboard’s R&B chart.
In 2022, after releasing 15 studio albums, winning four competitive Grammys, and being honored with a Grammy lifetime achievement award in 2020, Flack revealed via representatives that she had been diagnosed with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, and could no longer sing. (The following week, Roberta, a documentary about her life directed by Antonino D’Ambrosio, premiered at the Doc NYC film festival, subsequently debuting on PBS in January 2023.)
The announcement of Flack’s death on Monday elicited an outpouring of tributes from peers, friends, and admirers alike. Read a sampling of them below.
