Roberta Flack, the veteran Grammy-winning soul and R&B vocalist who recorded massive hits with “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” and “Killing Me Softly with His Song,” died Monday at age 88. Elaine Schock, Flack’s representative, confirmed the singer’s death, adding that she “died peacefully surrounded by her family. Roberta broke boundaries and records. She was also a proud educator.”
A cause of death was not immediately available, but in 2022, Flack was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, and lost her ability to sing. The disease, her rep said at the time, “has made it impossible to sing and not easy to speak.”
“She sang reveries as much as exclamations, and yet her stillness electrified the soul. In time, the style she created became known as ‘quiet storm,’” journalist Mikal Gilmore wrote in a tribute accompanying the announcement of her death. “If Roberta Flack was unlike singers who came before her, there were many who would emulate her in her wake. In fact, her influence has never stopped reverberating. She was a woman who sang in a measured voice, but her measurements moved times and events as much as they moved hearts.”
Born Feb. 10, 1939, in Ashville, North Carolina, Flack began playing classical piano as a teenager and was awarded a scholarship to Howard University. After graduating, she planned to continue her studies, but her father’s death forced her to leave school and start a teaching career in her home state. She eventually began gigging in clubs in Washington, D.C. (shows that were attended by the likes of Burt Bacharach and Johnny Mathis, spreading the buzz) and Flack was soon signed to Atlantic Records, which released her first album, First Take, in 1969.
Flack’s first hit, recorded with her friend and fellow Howard University student Donny Hathaway, was a version of Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend” in 1971. But Flack’s breakthrough arrived the following year. After Clint Eastwood used her meditative version of British folksinger Ewan MacColl’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” in his film Play Misty for Me, the song hit Number One on the pop charts and launched Flack’s career.
For several years, Flack’s sensuous voice and piano, which pioneered the Quiet Storm R&B genre, were ubiquitous on pop radio. Her version of “Killing Me Softly with His Song” hit Number One in 1973, as did a friskier single, “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” the following year. With Hathaway, she recorded some of the most beloved R&B duets of the era: “Where Is the Love” and “The Closet I Get to You.”
For a brief period, Flack took a break from the business and returned in the early Eighties, hitting the Top 40 again with another duet, “Tonight, I Celebrate My Love,” with Peabo Bryson.
Flack scored four Grammys alongside a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2020, picking up back to back Record of the Year awards for “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” and “Killing Me Softly With His Song.” “Where is the Love earned the duo a Grammy for Best Pop Vocal Performance. “It was overwhelming and breathtaking to be there,” Flack said of receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award. “When I met those artists and so many others in person and heard from them that they were inspired by my music, I felt understood.”
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