Singer Roberta Flack has died at age 88 of cardiac arrest. Flack’s voice emerged professionally in 1968 when she started singing at a restaurant in Washington, D.C. The Howard University graduate worked briefly as a music teacher after graduating at the age of 19. Jazz pianist Les McCann discovered her playing in a nightclub and got her an audition with Atlantic Records. Flack’s debut album, First Take, was released in 1969, followed by Chapter Two in 1970 and Quiet Fire in 1971. Her breakthrough came when Clint Eastwood picked “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” from First Take for his directorial debut, Play Misty For Me. The song became the biggest pop song of 1972, going to number one for six weeks, and the album topped the charts at the same position and went platinum. Flack received the Grammy for Record of the Year for “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” in 1973 and would win again in 1974 with “Killing Me Softly with His Song,” making her the first artist to win two years in a row. She started recording her timeless duets with Donny Hathaway at this time, and they shined together on “Where Is The Love,” which won a Grammy, and “The Closer I Get To You,” both singles selling million copies. Flack’s classically trained voice had become a staple of pop just as her voice teacher Frederick Wilson told her during her days of working at clubs when she was still finding her artistic voice. The ’70s were an incredible breakout period for Flack with plenty of opportunities, including her singing “When We Grow Up” with a teenaged Michael Jackson on the television special Free to Be…You and Me.
The singer had more hits in the ’80s, including the Burt Bacharach-written “Making Love” and a duet with Peabo Bryson, “Tonight, I Celebrate My Love.” Flack worked with Jackson again by providing the voice of his mother for the film Bad. She scored another duet in the ’90s with Maxi Priest when they sang together on “Set the Night to Music.’ Flack’s voice was heard a lot on quiet storm radio that focused on romantic R&B for late-night audiences. Her sound, like that of Nina Simone, was singular and not as easy to categorize by certain music critics. The classical background plus her childhood visits with her family to Lomax African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the Baptist church in her Arlington, Virginia, neighborhood, and a love of Sam Cooke and Mahalia Jackson were heard in Flack’s expression. She was able to dig into the deepest feelings with a sincerity and power that was subtle in its flow. The idea that her music was not true soul because it lacked ad-libbing and big church wails was ignorant and disputed by her fans and peers. Flack was inventive and created her own space that has inspired many R&B artists and those outside of the genre as well. She recorded 15 studio albums, and Let It Be Roberta, released in 2012, was her final one. In 2018, she recorded “Running” for the documentary 3100: Run and Become. She retired from performing in 2022 after she received a diagnosis for ALS. Flack’s music has been sampled and covered by many, including Lauryn Hill’s famous rendering of “Killing Me Softly” from The Fugees’ sophomore album, The Score. PBS released the documentary Roberta as a part of their American Masters series in 2023.
