Legendary singer Roberta Flack dies, aged 88
New York: Roberta Flack, the Grammy-winning singer and pianist whose intimate vocal and musical style made her one of the top recording artists of the 1970s and an influential performer long after, died Monday. She was 88.
She died at home surrounded by her family, publicist Elaine Schock said in a statement. Flack announced in 2022 that she had ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, and could no longer sing.
Roberta Flack pictured in New York in 2018.Credit: Matt Licari/Invision/AP
Little known before her early 30s, Flack became an overnight star after Clint Eastwood used The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face as the soundtrack for one of cinema’s more memorable and explicit love scenes, between the actor and Donna Mills in his 1971 film Play Misty for Me. The hushed, hymn-like ballad, with Flack’s graceful soprano afloat on a bed of soft strings and piano, topped the Billboard pop chart in 1972 and received a Grammy for record of the year.
“The record label wanted to have it re-recorded with a faster tempo, but he said he wanted it exactly as it was,” Flack told The Associated Press in 2018. “With the song as a theme song for his movie, it gained a lot of popularity and then took off.”
In 1973, she matched both achievements with Killing Me Softly With His Song, becoming the first artist to win consecutive Grammys for best record.
A classically trained pianist so gifted she received a full scholarship at age 15 to Howard, the historically Black university, Flack was discovered in the late 1960s by jazz musician Les McCann, who later wrote that “her voice touched, tapped, trapped, and kicked every emotion I’ve ever known”.
Flack was versatile enough to summon the up-tempo gospel passion of Aretha Franklin, but favoured a more measured and reflective approach, as if curating a song word by word.
For Flack’s many admirers, she was a sophisticated and bold new presence in the music world and in the social and civil rights movements of the time. Her friends included the Reverend Jesse Jackson and Angela Davis, whom Flack visited in prison while Davis faced charges – for which she was acquitted – for murder and kidnapping.
Flack sang at the funeral of Jackie Robinson, major league baseball’s first Black player, and was among the many guest performers on the feminist children’s entertainment project created by Marlo Thomas, Free to Be … You and Me.
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