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Roberta Flack, the legendary R&B/pop artist behind the No 1 hit “Killing Me Softly with His Song”, has died aged 88. She is widely considered to have been one of soul and R&B’s greatest voices.
A statement from her representative said that she died at home on Monday morning (24 February).
“We are heartbroken that the glorious Roberta Flack passed away,” the statement read. “She died peacefully surrounded by her family. Roberta broke boundaries and records. She was also a proud educator.”
Flack announced in 2022 that she had ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, and could no longer sing.
Flack demonstrated a rare ability to cross between genres with ease, whether on her tender cover of Ewan MacColl’s ballad “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” or on the meltingly smooth “Feel Like Makin’ Love”.
She was born in Black Mountain, North Carolina, in 1937. Both her parents were musical: her mother, Irene, was a church choir organist who introduced Flack to both gospel and classical music at a young age.
“I wanted to be successful, a serious all-round musician,” she told The Telegraph in 2015. “I listened to a lot of Aretha [Franklin], The Drifters, trying to do some of that myself, playing, teaching.”
Aged 15 and already adept at playing the piano, she was accepted to Howard University to study music on a full scholarship. Four years later, she considered a career as an opera singer until her father’s death, at which point she began teaching at a school in North Carolina.
At the same time, she impressed local audiences in DC with her virtuosic performances at nightclubs, leading to a residency at the restaurant and club Mr Henry’s. There, she met jazz pianist Les McCann, who in turn helped her sign to Atlantic Records in 1968.
Success came when director Clint Eastwood used her version of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” in a love scene for his thriller Play Misty for Me. It was her first major US hit, spending six weeks at the top of the US singles chart in 1972 and earning a Grammy award for Record of the Year.
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She repeated that feat in 1974 with her sublime, beautifully wrought performance of “Killing Me Softly”, becoming the first ever artist to win Record of the Year in two consecutive years.
Further hits in the Seventies included “Feel Like Makin’ Love” and “The Closer I Get to You”, duets with her close friend and former Howard University classmate Donny Hathaway. The partnership ended in tragedy when, in 1979, she and Hathaway were working on an album of duets when he suffered a breakdown during recording, and later that night fell to his death from his hotel room in Manhattan.
“We were deeply connected creatively,” Flack told Vibe in 2022, on the 50th anniversary of the million-selling Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway album. “He could play anything, sing anything. Our musical synergy was unlike [anything] I’d had before or since.”
While she struggled to repeat the same success, she continued to receive recognition through the Eighties with the Peabo Bryson duet “Tonight, I Celebrate My Love” and a decade later with the Maxi Priest duet “Set the Night to Music”.
Flack was also introduced to younger generations of music fans when the Fugees recorded a Grammy-winning cover of “Killing Me Softly”, which she eventually performed on stage with the hip-hop group. She devoted much of her time to the Roberta Flack School of Music, based in New York and attended by students between the ages of six and 14.
She was married once, to Stephen Novosel. For years, she lived on the same floor as John Lennon and Yoko Ono, the latter of whom became a close friend who provided liner notes for Flack’s album of Beatles covers, Let It Be Roberta.
Additional reporting by Press Association
