Roberta Flack was born on February 10, 1937 in Black Mountain, North Carolina, to parents Laron Flack, a jazz pianist and U.S. Veterans Administration draftsman, and Irene Flack a cook and church organist. According to DNA analysis, Flack was of Cameroonian descent. Her family moved to Richmond, Virginia, before settling in Arlington, Virginia, when she was five years old.Her first musical experiences were in church. She grew up in a large musical family and often provided piano accompaniment for the choir of Lomax African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church singing hymns and spirituals. She occasionally sings at the Macedonia Baptist Church in Arlington. From time to time, she caught gospel stars like Mahalia Jackson and Sam Cooke performing there. Her father acquired a battered old piano for her, which she learned to play sitting on her mother’s lap and Flack took formal lessons in playing the piano when she was nine. She gravitated towards classical music and during her early teens excelled at classical piano, finishing second in a statewide competition for Black students aged 13 playing a Scarlatti sonata.
In 1952 at the age of 15, preternaturally gifted and bookish, she won a full music scholarship to Howard University in Washington DC, and was one of the youngest students ever to enroll there. She eventually changed her major from piano to voice and became assistant conductor of the university choir. Roberta Flack 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.
Flack became a student teacher at a school near Chevy Chase, Maryland. She graduated from Howard University at 19 and began graduate studies in music there, but after the sudden death of her father she had to find work to support herself. She took a job teaching music and English at a small, segregated high school in Farmville, North Carolina, for which she was paid $2,800 a year.
Before becoming a professional singer-songwriter, Flack returned to Washington, D.C., and taught at Banneker, Browne, and Rabaut Junior High Schools. She also taught private piano lessons out of her home on Euclid Street, NW, in the city. During that time, her music career began to take shape on evenings and weekends in nightclubs.
At the Tivoli Theater she accompanied opera singers at the piano. During intermissions, she would sing blues, folk, and pop standards in a back room, accompanying herself on the piano. Later she performed several nights a week at the 1520 Club, providing her own piano accompaniment. About this time her voice teacher, Frederick “Wilkie” Wilkerson, told her that he saw a brighter future for her in pop music than in the classics. Flack modified her repertoire accordingly and her reputation spread. In 1968, she began singing professionally after she was hired to perform regularly at Mr. Henry’s Restaurant, located on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. where she developed an eclectic repertoire of about 600 songs and a riveting, unpretentious stage presence. And from those 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.
Her break came in the summer of 1968 when she performed at a benefit concert in Washington to raise funds for a children’s library in the city’s ghetto district, and was seen by soul and jazz singer Les McCann, who was signed to Atlantic Records. He was captivated by Flack’s voice and arranged an audition for her with Atlantic, in which she performed 42 songs from her nightclub repertoire in three hours for producer Joel Dorn. Dorn immediately told the label to sign her. In November 1968 she recorded 39 song demos in less than 10 hours. McCann later wrote in the liner notes of her first album, “Her voice touched, tapped, trapped, and kicked every emotion I’ve ever known. I laughed, cried, and screamed for more… she alone had the voice.”
Three months later, Atlantic recorded Flack’s debut album, First Take, in 10 hours. The album was “an elegant fusion of folk, jazz and soul” and included her version of British folk singer Ewan McColl’s song “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”
After spending almost 10 years as a Washington, D.C., schoolteacher and performing nights downtown, Roberta Flack zoomed quickly to worldwide stardom. In 1972, after her entire 5 minute version of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” was featured in a Clint Eastwood film. The song went within weeks to 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).
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, Flack jotted down the melody as she played Ms. Lieberman’s version over and over on her headphones. When she first sang 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.
A year later, she won in the pop vocal performance, female category for “Killing Me Softly”, a soft reference to Don McLean’s masterpiece “American Pie”. It was released in January 1973 as a single and became ubiquitous on AM radio stations across the country.
It would be Flack’s signature song for the rest of her life.-
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 her partner Donny Hathaway shared the award for best pop vocal performance by a duo, group or chorus, for “Where Is the Love.”
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”).
In 1975, the year she moved in next door to John Lennon and Yoko Ono in the Dakota building in New York City, Roberta 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 came to be recognized as an early example of quiet storm, an R&B subgenre that conquered airwaves in the 1980s.
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.)
Ms. Flack recorded the soundtrack to the 1981 Richard Pryor film “Bustin’ Loose.”
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.’”
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.
“Oasis,” a later-career highlight from 1988, was also a Flack production. 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.”
Roberta Flack had 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,” Rolling Stone Magazine wrote.
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.”
“Perhaps no other mainstream musical artist of the 1970s more complexly brought Black nationalism into discourse with European classical aesthetics,” one scholar said.
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 February 24, 2025 in Manhattan, New York. She was 88. The cause was cardiac arrest.
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