Roberta Flack, the fearless singer and pianist who made Grammy historical past with the chic No. 1 hits “The First Time Ever I Noticed Your Face” and “Killing Me Softly With His Track,” died Monday in New York. She was 88.
“We’re heartbroken that the fantastic Roberta Flack handed away this morning,” in accordance with a press release from her rep. “She died peacefully surrounded by her household. Roberta broke boundaries and data. She was additionally a proud educator.”
In November 2022, it was revealed that she had been identified with ALS, also referred to as Lou Gehrig’s illness, and will not sing. In 2016, she suffered a stroke, and she or he retired from performing two years later.
The North Carolina native and achieved classical pianist grew to become the primary artist to win the Grammy for Document of the Yr in consecutive years with the haunting “First Time Ever I Noticed Your Face” in 1973 and “Killing Me Softly With His Track” in ’74. (Billie Eilish duplicated the feat in 2020-21.)
After working as a instructor and moonlighting as a nightclub singer in Washington, D.C., Flack was signed by Atlantic Data and in 1969 launched her debut album, First Take, adopted a 12 months later by Chapter Two. The albums didn’t create a lot of a stir.
Nonetheless, when Clint Eastwood employed “The First Time Ever I Noticed Your Face” for his touching nature stroll and love scene with Donna Mills within the in any other case chaotic Play Misty for Me (1971), it was launched as a single in February 1972 and rocketed to No. 1, spending six weeks atop the Billboard Scorching 100. (Eastwood paid $1,000 for the rights to the tune, producer Joel Dorn says within the 2022 documentary Roberta.)
She obtained a second Grammy in 1973 for “The place Is the Love,” her duet together with her school good friend and frequent collaborator, the late Donny Hathaway. That tune made it as excessive as No. 5.
“Killing Me Softly,” which additionally earned Flack a Grammy for finest pop vocal efficiency, was No. 1 for 5 weeks in 1973. She topped the charts once more in ’74 with “Really feel Like Makin’ Love,” which netted her three of her 14 profession Grammy nominations.
She obtained a long-overdue Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2020.
“I at all times say that ‘love is a tune’ — which means that music reaches past age, race, nationality and faith to the touch our hearts,” she wrote in a 2020 electronic mail to NPR’s Ann Powers, who described the artist as “an interpreter as daring and discerning as her function fashions Nina Simone and Frank Sinatra.”
Roberta Flack in 1972, when “The First Time Ever I Noticed Your Face” spent six weeks at No. 1.
Keystone/Getty Photographs
Roberta Cleopatra Flack was born on Feb. 10, 1937, in Black Mountain, North Carolina, and raised in Arlington, Virginia. Her father, Laron, labored as a draftsman for the Veterans Administration, and her mom, Irene, was a church organist.
Flack took classical piano classes — at 13, she performed the whole rating of Handel’s “Messiah” for her church choir — attended Stevens Elementary College in Washington and Hoffman-Boston Excessive College in Arlington and gained a full musical scholarship to Howard College when she was 15.
As a baby, she created an alter ego, Rubina Flake, a famend live performance artist who dazzled crowds at Carnegie Corridor and, Powers mentioned, “helped Roberta endure the indignities confronted by gifted Black youngsters within the South.”
At 19, she left graduate faculty at Howard when her father died and went to work as an English instructor in Farmville, North Carolina, and Washington. She gave music classes on the facet and carried out at nightclubs together with the Capitol Hill hotspot Mr. Henry’s, the place she was found by jazz nice Les McCann in 1968 and signed by Atlantic.
“Her voice touched, tapped, trapped and kicked each emotion I’ve ever recognized,” McCann wrote within the liner notes for First Take. “I laughed, cried and screamed for extra … she alone had the voice.”
She was 32 when she arrived in New York realizing 600 songs to spend simply 10 hours recording her inaugural album, which contained “The First Time Ever I Noticed Your Face” — written in 1957 by British singer-songwriter Ewan MacColl and first recorded by his spouse, Peggy Seeger — and a canopy of Leonard Cohen’s “Hey, That’s No Approach to Say Goodbye.”
In a 2012 interview with The Daytona Seaside Information-Journal, Flack described speaking with Eastwood, who had heard “The First Time Ever I Noticed Your Face” on the radio whereas driving to work sooner or later:
“I’m in my home in Virginia. My mother was residing with me on the time. The telephone rings and she or he says, ‘Roberta, it’s Clint Eastwood.’ I believed anyone was enjoying a joke,” she recalled.
“He actually stunned me. I didn’t faint however I got here fairly shut as a result of I imply, this was a giant factor. The dialog went like this (imitates Eastwood’s voice): ‘I’d like to make use of your tune on this film I’m doing. It’s known as Play Misty for Me. It’s a couple of disc jockey, and it has numerous music in it. I’d use it in the one a part of the film the place there’s absolute love.’
“I mentioned OK. We mentioned the cash. After all I used to be shocked. I gulped and mentioned OK. He mentioned, ‘The rest?’ And I mentioned, ‘I wish to do it over once more. It’s too sluggish.’ He mentioned, ‘No, it’s not.’”
(Flack later recorded “This Facet of Endlessly,” which performed over the closing credit of Eastwood’s 1983 Soiled Harry movie, Sudden Affect.)
After releasing the albums Quiet Hearth in 1971 and Robert Flack and Donny Hathaway in 1972, she recorded Killing Me Softly in 1973. (The title monitor was co-written and initially recorded by Lori Lieberman, who penned it after attending a Don McLean live performance. Flack heard it for the primary time when it was supplied as a part of the in-flight leisure choices on a cross-country flight.)
She adopted with 1975’s Really feel Like Makin’ Love — its title tune was one other Document of the Yr nominee and made her the primary feminine vocalist since 1940 to high the chart in three consecutive years — and 1977’s Blue Lights within the Basement, which included the No. 2 hit “The Nearer I Get to You,” one other great duet with Hathaway.
After Hathaway died by suicide in 1979 — he and Flack had been within the studio earlier that day — she toured with Peabo Bryson, and so they had a High 20 tune in 1983 with “Tonight, I Have a good time My Love.” One other duet, “Set the Night time to Music,” with Maxi Priest, reached No. 6 in 1991. She additionally championed and recorded usually with Luther Vandross.
Her final album was 2012’s Let It Be Roberta: Roberta Flack Sings the Beatles. Lots of her LPs she produced as Rubina Flake.
For tv and movie, Flack additionally carried out “Collectively Via the Years,” the theme for the 1986-91 NBC sequence Valerie/The Hogan Household; sang within the choir for The Wiz (1978); and contributed songs to the Richard Pryor film Bustin’ Unfastened (1981).
She was married to bassist Steve Novosel from 1965 till their 1972 divorce. Within the ’80s, she lived in The Dakota in New York the place her next-door neighbors had been John Lennon and Yoko Ono; their son, Sean Lennon, known as her “Aunt Roberta.”
Roberta, the feature-length documentary, debuted in November 2022 on the DOCNYC movie competition, and a youngsters’s guide she co-wrote, The Inexperienced Piano: How Little Me Discovered Music, was launched in January 2023.
She has no survivors, her publicist mentioned.
“I’ve lengthy dreamed of telling my story to youngsters about that first inexperienced piano that my father obtained for me from the junkyard within the hope that they might be impressed to succeed in for his or her goals,” Flack mentioned. “I need them to know that goals can come true with persistence, encouragement from household and mates and, most of all, perception in your self.”
