Roberta Flack, Formative Quiet-Storm Singer, Dead at 88

Roberta Flack, the R&B musician whose singing helped define the subgenre of “quiet storm” in the 1970s, is dead at 88. Flack “died peacefully surrounded by her family,” per a statement from her publicists. “Roberta broke boundaries and records,” the statement said. “She was also a proud educator.” Flack loved classical music from an early age, earning a scholarship to Howard University at age 15. After graduating, she taught music throughout the 1960s while spending her nights accompanying opera singers on piano at clubs in Washington, D.C. She eventually began singing pop covers at the urging of a voice teacher and made a name for herself in D.C. clubs, where her audiences regularly included politicians and musicians. After the jazz pianist Les McCann saw Flack perform in 1969, he pushed his label, Atlantic Records, to sign her. Later that year, she released her debut album, First Take, a collection of covers named for the fact that they were first-take recordings.

Flack quickly followed that album with Chapter Two in 1970 and Quiet Fire in 1971. But she didn’t experience much commercial success until Clint Eastwood used Flack’s recording of the folk song “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” from First Take, for the soundtrack of his directorial debut, Play Misty for Me, in 1971. Flack’s version eventually hit No. 1 on Billboard’s “Hot 100,” became the top-selling single of 1972, and earned the Grammy for Record of the Year. That success continued with Flack’s 1972 duet album with soul singer Donny Hathaway as well as her 1973 recording of “Killing Me Softly With His Song.” That song also hit No. 1 and earned the Grammy for Record of the Year — making Flack the first artist to earn the award back-to-back. She earned a third No. 1 in 1974 with “Feel Like Makin’ Love.”

Flack’s soft, jazz-influenced recordings in the 1970s were early examples of quiet storm, a subgenre of R&B defined in the mid-’70s that became popular through the ’80s. She also broke barriers for women in the studio as she began co-producing her own work in the mid-’70s. Flack recorded regularly throughout the 1990s, gaining more hits including a 1991 version of “Set the Night to Music.” In 2012, she released her first album in over a decade and final full length, a collection of Beatles covers called Let It Be Roberta. Flack later retired from performing in 2022 owing to an ALS diagnosis. She earned a Lifetime Achievement Grammy in 2020 and was one of the inaugural inductees into the Women Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2021.