Roberta Flack, the revered singer behind soul classics together with “Killing Me Softly With His Music,” died this morning (February 24), her publicists stated in an e mail. No reason for demise was given, however Flack had been living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the neurological situation often known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s illness. She was 88 years previous.
Roberta Cleopatra Flack was born in 1937 to musician mother and father in Black Mountain, North Carolina. After the household moved to Arlington, Virginia, she sang in church and ultimately turned a piano prodigy. She was granted a scholarship for Howard College on the age of 15, making her one of many youngest college students to attend the faculty. She was an assistant conductor of the college choir and directed a manufacturing of the Verdi opera Aida. “For the primary three a long time of my life,” she told NPR’s Ann Powers in 2020, “I lived on the planet of classical music. I discovered in it fantastic melodies and harmonies that have been the automobiles by means of which I might categorical myself.”
After faculty, Flack accompanied opera singers in Washington, D.C., by night time, and took day jobs educating in public faculties to earn cash for her household following the demise of her father. However she was persuaded to carry out pop music in a residency on the Washington, D.C., membership Mr. Henry’s Restaurant, the place she turned an area sensation. Shortly thereafter, she acquired a recording contract from Atlantic.
From her 1969 debut, the single-take LP First Take, by means of her many landmark albums of people covers, Broadways songs, civil rights protest anthems, and authentic music within the ensuing years, Flack used her various musical experience to develop a deceptively mild, spare fashion that paired classical approach with the emotional drive of gospel; in a 1977 interview cited by the essayist Jason King, Flack stated, of her classical coaching, that she likes to “keep concerned within the construction of music” in each a “scientific and soulful means.”
Having begun her recording profession on the age of 32, she introduced her knowledge to a prolific sequence of classics in these early years. She blueprinted a trademark sound that drew admirers of soul, jazz, and straightforward listening whereas remaining attuned to the risky currents of the civil rights motion; as she put it in a 2023 documentary, “I protested as a singer with a variety of love.” She was additionally a pop phenomenon. Her hits “The First Time Ever I Noticed Your Face,” “Killing Me Softly With His Music,” and “Really feel Like Makin’ Love” got here out in successive years beginning in 1972, the primary two incomes back-to-back File of the 12 months Grammy Awards. She stays the one artist to have scored the feat.
