Roberta Flack Dead At 88

Roberta Flack, the R&B great behind a string of classic ’70s hits, most famously “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” has died. Variety reports that Flack passed away this morning, according to a statement from her representative. No cause of death has been reported, though Flack suffered from ALS in recent years.

Roberta Cleopatra Flack was born in Black Mountain, North Carolina, and she grew up in in northern Virginia. She learned to sing and play piano in the church, and she studied classical piano and voice at Howard University, where she conducted the student choir. After college, she taught music in Farmville, North Carolina and in Washington, DC. While teaching, Flack would perform at DC nightclubs, and she quit her teaching job when a local restaurant gave her a regular gig. One night, she was discovered by the jazz great Les McCann, who arranged an audition with Atlantic. Flack signed with the label. In 1969, she released First Take, the debut album that she recorded in a single day.

Flack’s early Atlanta records didn’t sell very well, but Clint Eastwood randomly heard her version of the folk song “The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face” on the radio one day, and he included it on the soundtrack of his directorial debut, 1972’s Play Misty For Me. The record, re-released three years after it appeared on First Take, became a #1 hit and won the Grammy for Record Of The Year. Flack was in her mid-thirties when that song took off, but she leapt right into a career as a hitmaker. In 1972, Flack and fellow soul great Donny Hathaway started recording together regularly, and their duet “Where Is The Love” reached #5. A year later, Flack released her version of “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” a track first released a year earlier by folk singer Lori Lieberman. Flack’s “Killing Me Softly With His Song” reached #1 and won another Record Of The Year Grammy, and it became her signature song.

Roberta Flack landed her third and final #1 hit with “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” a 1974 song that she produced herself. Flack continued to record with Donny Hathaway, and their 1978 duet “The Closer I Get To You” was a #2 hit. Flack and Hathaway were in the middle of recording an album of duets when Hathaway died by suicide in 1979. Flack was devastated. Her career slowed down in the ’80s, but she continued to work. Flack landed a minor hit with “Makin’ Love,’ a 1982 movie theme co-written by Burt Bacharach. At Clint Eastwood’s request, Flack recorded the theme song for his 1983 Dirty Harry sequel Sudden Impact. In 1991, Flack and reggae singer Maxi Priest reached #6 with a cover of “Set The Night To Music,” a song that Diane Warren wrote for Starship.

Flack wasn’t a pop-chart presence after “Set The Night To Music,” but she had a permanent place in the R&B firmament. Flack got famous by making hazy, laid-back, jazz-inflected love songs, and she never changed her style much to fit pop trends. In later generations, she served as an avatar of tastefulness and class. In 1996, Lauryn Hill covered “Killing Me Softly With His Song” on the Fugees’ album The Score, and the Fugees performed the song with flack at the VMAs. Flack continued to perform until 2018, and she released her final album, a collection of Beatles covers, in 2012.

Below, check out some of Roberta Flack’s work.