Grammy award-winning singer Roberta Flack, who crooned hits like “Killing Me Softly with His Song” and “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” has died, a representative confirmed to NBC News.
She was 88.
In November 2022, a representative announced that Flack had ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, and could no longer sing.
The progressive disease “has made it impossible to sing and not easy to speak,” Flack’s manager Suzanne Koga said in a news release.
Flack was born February 10, 1937, in North Carolina. The daughter of a church organist, Flack began playing classical piano at a young age.
At the age of 15, her talents earned her a scholarship to Howard University in Washington, D.C.
Jazz musician Les McCann claims he discovered Flack’s talents while she was singing at Mr. Henry’s, a Washington nightclub.
“Her voice touched, tapped, trapped and kicked every emotion I’ve ever known,” McCann said. “I laughed, cried and screamed for more.”
Eventually, McCann helped the young singer sign with Atlantic Records Group where Flack recorded “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” which was written by Ewan MacColl.
The song became a breakout for Flack after it appeared on her first album, “First Take,” in 1969. After being used in Clint Eastwood’s 1971 directorial debut “Play Misty for Me,” however, Atlantic Records released a radio version, which became a huge hit, peaking at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1972.
In 1973, the song won the Grammy for “Record of the Year” and “Song of the Year.”
Dozens of hits followed, including “Killing Me Softly with His Song” and “Feel like Makin’ Love” — Flack’s second and third No. 1 song on the Billboard Hot 100 — both of which Flack recorded with Howard University classmate Donny Hathaway.
The pair recorded several songs together until Hathaway died in 1979 from a fall from a New York hotel room that was ruled a suicide.
“He was very sensitive, reacting to the things around him, and whatever was inside of him. He was a genius, so he wasn’t satisfied with his own performances, his own output,” Flack told The Washington Post shortly after the tragedy. “Like many creative people, his good periods were very exuberant and his lows were extremely low.”
The loss hurt personally and professionally, but Flack would find a new partner, teaming up and touring with Peabo Bryson in 1980. The duo scored a hit in 1983 with “Tonight, I Celebrate My Love.” She spent the remainder of the 1980s touring and performing, and returned to the Top Ten once more in 1991 with “Set the Night to Music,” a duet with Maxi Priest. In 1997, Flack released an anthology of Christmas standards simply titled, “Christmas Album.”
Flack’s music was introduced to a new generation in the ’90s thanks to the Fugees. With Lauryn Hill on lead vocals, their version of “Killing Me Softly with his Song” topped the charts around the world in 1996.
In 1999, Flack received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Later that year, Flack toured in South Africa, performing for then-South African President Nelson Mandela.
Flack toured well into her 70s and 80s, performing for audiences around the world.
In the late 2000s, Flack founded the Roberta Flack School of Music at the Hyde Leadership Charter School in the Bronx, “providing an innovative and inspiring music education program to underprivileged students free of charge.”
In recent years, however, Flack struggled through some health issues. She had a stroke in 2016, and was hospitalized two years later when she felt dizziness at a Jazz Foundation of America event in which she was due to receive an award. But she returned to the stage to sing as recently as October 2018 at a party for that same charity.
To the end, Flack performed the classics that had made her a star.
“(It’s hard to) be moved, to be moved constantly by your own songs,” Flack told The Associated Press in 2018. “You need it to be in tune with them, and I don’t mean in tune musically, but I mean in tune with the lyrics of the songs, with the words of the songs, and with the meaning. You need to be in tune with all of that, and that takes a little bit of doing.”
