Roberta Flack, Virtuoso Singer-Pianist Behind ‘Killing Me Softly,’ Dies at 88

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 on 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. Ms. 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, Ms. Flack zoomed to worldwide stardom in 1972, after her version of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” was featured in a Clint Eastwood film.

The song had been released three years earlier, on her debut album for Atlantic Records, but came out as a single only after the 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.”

Ms. 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”).

“Roberta Flack underplays everything with a quietness and gentleness,” the writer and folklorist Julius Lester once observed in a Rolling Stone review. “More than any singer I know, she can take a quiet, slow song (and most of hers are) and infuse it with a brooding intensity that is, at times, almost unbearable.”

Mr. Lester heard in Ms. Flack an “amazing ability to get further inside a song than one thought humanly possible and to bring responses from places inside you that you never knew existed.”

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,” Ms. 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, Ms. 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, Ms. 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, Ms. 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.”

Ms. Flack belonged to a broad and continuing tradition of singer-pianists — Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, Alicia Keys — whose music is equally rooted in the blues, the Black church and Western classical music, and who have consistently challenged the strictures imposed by commercial genre.

She saw no need to choose between a broad, accessible repertoire and a proud Afrocentrism, steeped in both 1960s radicalism and her own religious upbringing. As the scholar Jason King wrote, “Perhaps no other mainstream musical artist of the 1970s more complexly brought Black nationalism into discourse with European classical aesthetics.”

From her inaugural album’s first track — “Compared to What,” a shot of sharp social commentary written by her longtime collaborator Eugene McDaniels — Ms. Flack frequently sang songs of social frustration and racial solidarity.

One of her most tender and affecting performances came alongside Donny Hathaway on “Be Real Black for Me,” a song of love and mutual admiration that they had written with Charles Mann. (It was later famously sampled by the rapper Scarface on his 2002 single “On My Block.”)

In performance, she and Mr. Hathaway recast “Somewhere,” the Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim Broadway hit, as a declaration of Black solidarity and resolution. “Someday, somehow/We’ll find a new way of living/We’ll find a way of forgiving,” they sang, their voices closely entwined. In one rendition caught on film, she pauses halfway through the first verse to inform her audience: “I want you to know, this has absolutely nothing to do with ‘West Side Story.’ I hope I won’t have to explain it to you.”

And from her early days performing at Mr. Henry’s, a gay-friendly cabaret, Ms. Flack was also a staunch advocate of gay rights. She sang “Ballad of the Sad Young Men” on her debut album, and in performance she often introduced it as a story of young gay barflies seeking belonging.

She sang the theme song to “Making Love,” a 1982 film about a man grappling with his sexual identity. “I was so glad when that song charted,” Ms. Flack said in an interview with Hotspots magazine. “People who did not know that the song was about love between two men loved that song. I would talk about it in my shows, and about how love is love. Between a man and a woman, between two men, between two women. Love is universal, like music. I always say, ‘Love is a song.’”

Royalty in Waiting

Roberta Cleopatra Flack was born on Feb. 10, 1937, in Black Mountain, N.C., 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 the Veterans Administration; her mother, Irene (Council) Flack, was a cook at a high school who also taught music and played the organ at Arlington’s A.M.E. Zion Church.

“I grew up playing piano for the choir: Handel, Bach, Verdi, Mozart and all those great, wonderful, intricately written Negro spirituals,” Ms. Flack remembered in a 1991 interview with The Chicago Tribune. But she would also sneak down the road to the local Baptist church, savoring its rawer forms of musical worship. From time to time, she caught gospel stars like Mahalia Jackson and Sam Cooke performing there.

Ms. Flack always identified with her family’s Southern history. “I like to say that two preachers came from Black Mountain. Billy Graham and I,” she was quoted as saying in a 1971 Ebony article. “He’s preaching in his way and I’m preaching my way.”

Ms. Flack has no immediate survivors. A seven-year marriage to the bassist Steve Novosel (which violated the law in Virginia, where interracial marriage was still illegal when she married Mr. Novosel, who is white) ended in divorce, as did a later marriage.

At 13, Ms. 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. She became the first undergraduate vocal student to give a public recital in classical vocal literature, and she conducted a student production of “Aida” that drew a standing ovation from Howard’s music faculty.

But a dean warned that the opportunities in classical orchestras would be scarce for a Black woman, advising Ms. 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, N.C., where she taught English and music to children in a deeply impoverished community — an experience that left a lasting impression. “There was no piano in my classroom, but I went from room to room with a pitch pipe and autoharp, teaching them music,” she told Ebony.

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, Ms. Flack accompanied opera singers on piano as they promenaded across the room. During intermissions, she sometimes retired to a piano in the back room 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 Ms. Flack, with a stage and rows of pew-style seating.

She was soon the talk of D.C. “I was trying to develop my skill, to read music, interpret it, rearrange it,” she told the BBC for a documentary, “Killing Me Softly: The Roberta Flack Story.” “I felt I could do everything, and I felt comfortable enough to know that if I had a chance I could show anybody.”

Stars like Burt Bacharach and Johnny Mathis made a point of going to Mr. Henry’s when they were in town. One night, Liberace came and sat in, playing a piano duet with Ms. Flack. And, celebrity guests or not, what were supposed to be two- or three-set nights would often stretch on much longer. “I just couldn’t get up from the piano,” she said.

When the 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.”

Mr. 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.

Reporting from Washington for The Times in 1970, Jack Rosenthal described Ms. Flack as royalty in waiting. Around the city, he wrote, “her conquest has been so complete that, for months, mention of her name has inevitably raised the question, ‘When’s Roberta going to make it nationally?’”

Critics warmly received her albums “First Take” (1969), “Chapter Two” (1970) and “Quiet Fire” (1971), and she attracted ears in the jazz world, but Ms. Flack lacked a hit single until Mr. Eastwood chose to give “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” — an achingly slow ballad written by the folk singer Ewan MacColl — a starring role in his 1971 psychological thriller, “Play Misty for Me.” For five otherwise wordless minutes, the entire song plays through as Mr. Eastwood and Donna Mills stroll across a windy beach, past crashing waves and into the forest.

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, Ms. Flack was a superstar.

A Signature Song

“Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway,” an album of duets with her old friend from Howard University 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, Ms. 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. Ms. 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, Ms. Flack jotted down the melody as she played Ms. 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 Ms. Flack’s signature song for the rest of her life.

In 1975, the year she moved in next door to John Lennon and Yoko Ono in the Dakota building in New York City, Ms. Flack released “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” her first self-produced album and another smash hit. With its feathery, electrified sound and prowling beat, the title track (written by Mr. McDaniels) came to be recognized as an early example of quiet storm, an R&B subgenre that conquered airwaves in the 1980s.

“The thing that engulfs me in music is the pulse. If I can find that heartbeat, I can live in there — in that music,” she told an interviewer in 2012. “I think that’s the same for everyone. I also think that that’s what makes a song a hit.”

Her subsequent albums, “Blue Lights in the Basement” (1977), “Roberta Flack” (1978) and “Roberta Flack Featuring Donny Hathaway” (1979), tacked further toward the dance floor, with a smoother and bouncier style. Together with “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” this streak of self-produced or co-produced recordings put Ms. Flack’s talents as an arranger and bandleader on full display. (She used a pseudonym, Rubina Flake, for her production work.) “Oasis,” a later-career highlight from 1988, was also a Flack production. During these years, while battling intermittent bouts of tonsillitis, she pursued a doctorate in education at the University of Massachusetts, though she never completed it.

Ms. Flack recorded the soundtrack to the 1981 Richard Pryor film “Bustin’ Loose.” By the middle of the decade her recorded output had slowed, though she still performed often. She became a mentor to younger vocalists, including Luther Vandross and Peabo Bryson, both of whom sang alongside Ms. Flack before stepping straight into solo careers, largely thanks to her support.

She frequently worked benefit concerts into her touring schedule, and from 2006 to 2011 she funded and helped direct a program known as the Roberta Flack School of Music at the Hyde Leadership Charter School in the Bronx. She also served for many years as a spokesperson for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and allowed the organization to use “The First Time” royalty-free in TV commercials.

Throughout her life, Ms. Flack maintained an interest in spirituality and the occult, an orientation she credited to the influence of her grandmother, who had been a healer.

Ms. 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.

Into her latest years, Ms. Flack savored the memory of school-teaching days and club nights in Washington. When asked in 2017 if she ever went back to Mr. Henry’s, which still hosts live music, she didn’t miss a beat: “I was there recently. I love the crab cakes.”

Ash Wu contributed reporting.