Roberta Flack, the R&B innovator recognized for songs like “The First Time I Ever Noticed Your Face,” “Killing Me Softly With His Music,” and “Really feel Like Makin’ Love,” has died on the age of 88.
“We’re heartbroken that the fantastic Roberta Flack handed away this morning, February 24, 2025,” the singer’s consultant stated in an announcement. “She died peacefully surrounded by her household. Roberta broke boundaries and data. She was additionally a proud educator.” A reason for loss of life was not disclosed; nonetheless, Flack had been battling ALS since 2022.
Roberta Cleopatra Flack was born on February tenth, 1937 in Black Mountain, North Carolina, and was raised in Arlington, Virginia. Her mom was a church organist, and a younger Roberta started singing with church buildings of various denominations — together with the historic Lomax African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church — simply to take pleasure in their music. She began taking part in piano at age 9, and by her teenage years, she was so good that Howard College awarded her a full music scholarship.
Flack graduated from Howard at 19 and started instructing music within the Washington, DC space. She started singing in golf equipment on weekends and evenings, accompanying opera singers on piano and singing blues, folks, and pop requirements to herself within the again room throughout intermissions. Beneath the advisement of her voice instructor, Frederick “Wilkie” Wilkerson, Flack started singing extra pop music than classics, and in 1968, she started acting at Mr. Henry’s Restaurant on Capitol Hill.
Flack grew to become the act to see at Mr. Henry’s, with Woody Allen, Invoice Cosby, Ramsey Lewis, and others visiting the restaurant to listen to her sing. After jazz pianist Les McCann noticed her carry out, he organized for Flack to audition for Atlantic Information. Her debut album, First Take, dropped on the label in 1969. Due to her classical coaching, Flack went on to craft a minimalist model that shared virtually as a lot with Seventies simple listening as with modern soul.
In 1971, Flack joined Wilson Pickett, Ike & Tina Turner, Santana, The Staple Singers, Les McCann, Eddie Harris, The Voices of East Harlem, and extra within the Ghana Independence Day live performance memorialized within the Soul to Soul live performance movie. The following 12 months, she obtained her first Billboard hit together with her cowl of “Will You Nonetheless Love Me Tomorrow,” which rose to No. 76 on the Sizzling 100. In the meantime, Clint Eastwood chosen her track “The First Time I Ever Noticed Your Face” to look in his directorial debut Play Misty for Me, and it grew to become her first No. 1 hit. The observe received File of the 12 months the 1973 Grammys, and Flack went on to file music for Eastwood’s 1983 movie, Sudden Affect.
In 1972, Flack started working with soul legend Donny Hathaway. The 2 recorded the Grammy-winning single “The place Is the Love” and the gold single “The Nearer I Get to You,” amongst others, and labored collectively till Hathaway’s loss of life in 1979. Along with her 1973 album Killing Me Softly, Flack scored her second No. 1 with the title observe, which received each File of the 12 months and Finest Feminine Pop Efficiency on the 1974 Grammys. Many years later, the track earned new life when the Fugees recorded a canopy for his or her 1996 debut The Rating. Flack’s third and remaining No. 1, “Really feel Like Makin’ Love,” debuted in 1974.
Whereas Flack by no means once more had a No. 1 hit, she launched a variety of common songs within the Nineteen Eighties, together with “Making Love” and “Tonight, I Have a good time My Love.” She sang the theme track for the NBC sitcom The Hogan Household and equipped the voice of Michael Jackson’s mom within the music video for “Dangerous” over 10 years after she joined the artist in singing “When We Develop Up” for the tv particular Free to Be…You and Me. In 1991, “Set the Night time to Music,” her duet with Jamaican artist Maxi Priest, breached the Prime 10.
Flack launched music into the twenty first century. In 2012, she recorded an album of Beatles covers referred to as Let It Be Roberta, and in 2018, she shared her remaining studio album, Working. That 12 months, the artist was on stage on the Apollo Theater in New York Metropolis for a profit live performance when she grew to become sick and left the stage. She was rushed to the hospital, and in an announcement, her supervisor revealed that she had suffered a stroke a number of years prior.
In 2020, Flack was honored with the Grammys Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2022, she introduced that she had been recognized with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a neurodegenerative illness that impacts nerve cells within the spinal wire and mind. On the time, she stated the illness made it troublesome to talk and not possible to sing, however that she nonetheless had a variety of tasks within the works, together with a kids’s ebook, a documentary about her life, and a fiftieth anniversary reissue of her landmark album Killing Me Softly. The documentary, Roberta, premiered in November 2022 at DOCNYC, whereas the kids’s ebook The Inexperienced Piano: How Little Me Discovered Music and the Killing Me Softly reissue have been slated for 2023.