By Giovanni Russonello
Roberta Flack, the magnetic singer and pianist whose intimate blend of soul, jazz and folk made her one of the most popular artists of the 1970s, died Monday in Manhattan. She was 88.
She died en route to a hospital, according to Suzanne Koga, her manager and friend. The cause was cardiac arrest, she said. Flack revealed in 2022 that she’d been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, which left her unable to perform.
After spending almost 10 years as a Washington, D.C., schoolteacher and performing nights downtown, Flack zoomed to worldwide stardom in 1972, after her version of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” was featured in the Clint Eastwood film “Play Misty for Me.”
The song had been released three years earlier, on her debut album for Atlantic Records, but came out as a single only after the 1971 film was released. Within weeks it was at No. 1 on the Billboard chart — a perch she would reclaim two more times, with “Killing Me Softly With His Song” (1973) and “Feel Like Makin’ Love” (1974).
In both 1973 and ’74, she won Grammy Awards for record of the year, and in both years the composers of her hits won for song of the year. In 1973, she and Donny Hathaway shared the award for best pop vocal performance by a duo, group or chorus, for “Where Is the Love.” A year later, she won in the pop vocal performance, female category for “Killing Me Softly.”
Flack’s steady, powerful voice could convey tenderness, pride, conviction or longing, but hardly ever despair. Most of her best-known albums included at least a few funk and soul tracks, driven by a slapping backbeat and rich with observational social commentary. But her biggest hits were always something else: slow folk ballads (“The First Time”) or mellifluous anthems (“Killing Me Softly”) or plush love songs (“Feel Like Makin’ Love”).
Critics often struggled to describe the understated strength of her voice, and the breadth of her stylistic range. In its poise, its interiority and conviction, its lack of sentimentality or overstatement, her singing seemed to press the reset button on any standard expectations of a pop star. She placed equal priority on passion and clear communication — like an instructor speaking to an inquisitive student, or a lover pledging devotion.
“I’ve been told I sound like Nina Simone, Nancy Wilson, Odetta, Barbra Streisand, Dionne Warwick, even Mahalia Jackson,” Flack told The New York Times in 1970. “If everybody said I sounded like one person, I’d worry. But when they say I sound like them all, I know I’ve got my own style.”
Preternaturally gifted and bookish, Flack entered college at 15 and graduated while still a teenager. But her musical career blossomed slowly; by the time she found the spotlight, she was well into her 30s and had only recently quit teaching junior high school.
At a small Capitol Hill club called Mr. Henry’s, she had spent years developing an eclectic repertoire of about 600 songs and a riveting, unpretentious stage presence. Even when her fame exploded and her beauty shone on the international stage, Flack never became larger than life or shed the persona of an earnest, wise-beyond-her-years schoolteacher.
A virtuoso classical pianist who often sang from the piano bench, Flack described her approach as something like disrobing before the audience. “I want everybody to see me as I am,” she told The National Observer in 1970. “Your voice cracks? OK, darlin’, you go right on and keep giving it what you’ve got left, and the audience ignores it and goes right along with you. I’ve found out the way to get myself through to people is just to unzip myself and let everything hang out.”
Roberta Cleopatra Flack was born on Feb. 10, 1937, in Black Mountain, North Carolina, the second oldest of five siblings. In her early childhood, the family moved to Virginia, first to Richmond and then to Arlington, a segregated suburb of Washington. Her father, Laron Flack, worked as a draftsman in Veterans Affairs; her mother, Irene (Council) Flack, was a cook at a high school who also taught music and played the organ at Arlington’s AME Zion Church.
Flack has no immediate survivors. A seven-year marriage to bassist Steve Novosel (which violated the law in Virginia, where interracial marriage was still illegal when she married Novosel, who is white) ended in divorce, as did a later marriage.
At 13, Flack won second place in a statewide competition for Black students after performing a Scarlatti sonata; she was convinced that she had deserved the main prize and that the judges were thrown off by the sight of a Black girl playing classical music with such command. Just two years later, she entered Howard University on a full scholarship.
A dean warned that the opportunities in classical orchestras would be scarce for a Black woman, advising Flack to pursue a teaching career. Upon graduating, she started working toward a master’s degree in music education.
After her father’s death, needing to support herself, she dropped out and took a job at a grade school in Farmville, North Carolina, where she taught English and music to children in a deeply impoverished community.
After a year, she returned to Washington and began teaching at junior high schools in the city while establishing herself on the nightclub circuit. At the upscale Tivoli restaurant, Flack accompanied opera singers on piano as they promenaded across the room. During intermissions, she sometimes retired to a piano in the backroom where she sang blues, folk and pop songs for the staff.
Soon came gigs under her own name at the 1520 Club and Mr. Henry’s, which was known for attracting a racially diverse clientele and for welcoming openly gay and lesbian patrons. The restaurant outfitted its upstairs specifically for Flack, with a stage and rows of pew-style seating.
When star soul-jazz pianist and vocalist Les McCann heard her in 1968 at the nearby Bohemian Caverns, he was floored. “Her voice touched, tapped, trapped and kicked over every emotion I’ve ever known,” he later wrote in the liner notes to her debut album. “I laughed, cried and screamed for more.”
McCann arranged for her to audition for Atlantic Records. In a three-hour tryout for the company’s Joel Dorn, she performed more than 40 songs out of her vast repertoire. He signed her immediately.
Critics warmly received her albums “First Take” (1969), “Chapter Two” (1970) and “Quiet Fire” (1971), and she attracted ears in the jazz world, but Flack lacked a hit single until Eastwood chose to give “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” — an achingly slow ballad written by folk singer Ewan MacColl — a starring role in his 1971 psychological thriller, “Play Misty for Me.”
The song had originally appeared on “First Take,” but Atlantic rushed it out as a single in 1972 and it sped to No. 1. All of a sudden, Flack was a superstar.
“Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway,” an album of duets with her friend that many critics consider a creative high-water mark, also became a hit. It reached No. 3 on Billboard’s album chart on the strength of their buoyant renditions of Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend” and “Where Is the Love,” written for the duo by Ralph MacDonald and William Salter.
She received the 1972 Trendsetter Award from Billboard, “for moving jazz into the pop market with her soft, delicate vocal style.” And she won major Grammys in each of the next two years.
One day in 1972, Flack heard Lori Lieberman’s “Killing Me Softly” playing on an American Airlines flight. She immediately latched onto the tune’s spinning-wheel melody, delicately balanced between major and minor, and its mysterious lyrics. Lieberman had sent a demo of the song to Helen Reddy, a major pop star at the time, but she was turned off by the title and the tape languished on her desk.
On the airplane, Flack jotted down the melody as she played Lieberman’s version over and over on her headphones. When she first performed it at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles, while opening for Marvin Gaye, the audience erupted at the end. Quincy Jones, who was there, counseled her to keep the song to herself until she’d recorded it.
It was released in January 1973 as a single and became ubiquitous on AM radio stations across the country. It would be Flack’s signature song for the rest of her life.
Flack was honored in 2018 with a lifetime achievement award from the Jazz Foundation of America, and two years later with a Grammy for lifetime achievement.
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