Roberta Flack

February 10, 1937 – February 24, 2025

(NEW YORK) – We are heartbroken that the glorious Roberta Flack passed away this morning February 24, 2025. She died peacefully surrounded by her family. Roberta broke boundaries and records. She was also a proud educator.

Roberta Flack

Written by Mikel Gilmore & Suzanne Koga

She was unlike any other popular vocalist that preceded her. Indeed, Roberta Flack couldn’t be contained simply by categories. 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.” It was a fitting term not just for her sensibility but also for her effect. “When Flack sings a song,” wrote Jim Farber in The Guardian in 2020, “she caresses each cadence, considering and intensifying them, the better to realize the full meaning of the lyric. It’s a one-of-a-kind style, often misconstrued as minimalist. In fact, it contains many complex and roiling parts, and, often, it escalates to a vocal crescendo so thunderous it could shake a concert hall to its core.”

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.

She was born as Roberta Cleopatra Flack, in Black Mountain, North Carolina, on February 10, 1937, and was raised in Arlington, Virginia. Her mother, Irene, played organ at the Lomax African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, and her father, Laron, was a Veterans Administration draftsman, and also a serious pianist and jazz interpreter on the side. Flack said in Antonino D’Ambrosio’s documentary, Roberta, “I was in awe of my mother’s ability to play the organ and make such beautiful sounds which I did not understand but I loved.” By the time she was nine, Roberta was on her way to understanding those sounds. “My father,” she told Forbes in 2021, “found an old, smelly piano in a junkyard and restored it for me and painted it green. This was my first piano and was the instrument in which I found my expression and inspiration as a young person.”

Her musical background was fairly atypical for somebody who became a force in popular music—but that uncommon upbringing is what would help make her such a singular force in pop music. Though she liked high-spirited Baptist gospel music—the kind that Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin came up in—the AME church’s style of gospel was rather different. “We had a sort of high form of church liturgy,” she said, “and the music I grew up playing was the Handel Messiah and the Bach Christmas Oratorio, parts of the Mozart Requiem.” Classical music was, in fact, Flack’s true foundation. When she was nine, learning to play on that green piano her father had restored for her, she started studying classical piano repertoire. “It was classical music,” writes NPR’s Ann Powers, “that first taught Flack that anything could be incorporated into her art. The compositions she loved struck her as open fields where any idea or feeling could circulate.” Flack told Powers in 2020: “For the first three decades of my life, I lived in the world of classical music. I found in it wonderful melodies and harmonies that were the vehicles through which I could express myself.” Flack could get both lost and found in that music. “Chopin nocturnes and preludes,” she noted in a different interview. “I’d sit and cry, silently, when I played Chopin. That was when I felt the presence of God. And I felt very grown up. That stayed with me for a long, long time. My mother would look at me and shake her head, because she didn’t understand my mind. I’ve always been…considered different.”

Roberta proved to be a piano prodigy. While still an adolescent, she accompanied the Lomax AME Church’s choir on piano. When she was thirteen, she won second prize in a piano competition in Richmond for African-American students, but it proved a hard lesson. “I should have won,” she later said, “but I didn’t, and one of the reasons that I didn’t win was because it was a segregated contest. The kind of performance I gave could’ve been very easily a colorless one. I played a Scarlatti sonata, and I played it in the style that Scarlatti was supposed to be played. I didn’t play it like a little Black girl from Virginia playing a Scarlatti sonata. I think they expected me to play something else or to sing something else. I should have been judged on my ability to perform Scarlatti, no matter what my color. And that was something I never quite understood for a long, long time.”

But there was no denying her skill. After skipping several grades, Flack was awarded a full musical scholarship at Howard University—a historically Black research university—in Washington D.C. She entered the university at age 15—one of the youngest students ever to enroll at Howard. She soon moved from specializing in piano studies to a music education major. Flack had been told that hope for being a classical concert pianist was improbable, given racial barriers in America. The change in majors, though, afforded her other opportunities, such as voice training, which was something she hadn’t concentrated on before. She became assistant conductor of the university choir, and she directed a production of Verdi’s Aida that received a standing ovation from the Howard University faculty. She hoped to become an opera singer. But her father’s sudden death in 1959 caused Flack to put that dream on hold. She returned to North Carolina and took a job teaching music in public schools. A year later she returned to D.C., where she taught at several middle and high schools for nearly a decade- the start of her lifelong commitment to education.

In 1962, Flack began accompanying opera singers at the Tivoli Opera Restaurant in Georgetown, (Washington, D.C.). Around this time, her voice teacher told her that she would probably fare better at singing pop music rather than the classics, and she soon saw the proof. Flack recalled, “One Christmas season, the restaurant manager said to me, ‘Stop playing the arias. Play Christmas carols.’ So, I started doing all the Christmas songs. I was singing, ‘Chestnuts roasting on the open fire…’ Everybody got quiet.” During intermissions she began singing blues, folk, and pop standards in a back room, accompanying herself on the piano. “People started coming to not just hear me play for other people to sing,” said Flack, “but to hear what I was going to do in between those arias.”

Constantly expanding her repertoire, she began playing various clubs in the D.C. area, until she had about 600 compositions she knew by heart (including the classical pieces). She eventually took a residency at Mister Henry’s, a well-known Capitol Hill club. “As word spread about me,” Flack said, “and people came to see me on Sundays, [club owner] Henry Jaffe added a room for me and my trio. It was called, Mr. Henry’s Upstairs. I performed five nights a week, three shows per night—that’s a lot of music and every set was different.” Jaffe installed church pew seating, as well as customized acoustics. Jason King, author of “The Sound of Velvet Melting: The Power of ‘Vibe’ in the Music of Roberta Flack,” said: “He wanted to create an intimate space for her, to capture this quality in her music that feels inviting. That’s one of the things that made her such a hit.”

“There was no end to the people coming in there,” said Flack, “and I mean senators, the Kennedys, no end—once I got out there. It wasn’t the money, it never was.” Indeed, Flack became quite a draw. “Coming to hear me sing on Sundays was the thing to do; we had lines all the way around the block on Sunday afternoons, even when it rained.” In addition to senators, she saw other well-known faces in the audience. One night, she looked up to see Burt Bacharach and Hal David. Others—including Carmen McRae, Eddie Harris, Woody Allen, Ramsey Lewis, Dionne Warwick and Johnny Mathis—were in regular attendance. “I was developing an attitude,” she later told an interviewer, “which is the thing that determines how high you fly. It was all because of the exposure and environment.”

In 1969, jazz pianist Les McCann had a show in the D.C. area. He’d heard about Flack repeatedly, so he decided to make his trip a day earlier, so he could see her for himself. He became a believer. “Phew, that was it,” he said. “I saw what appeared to be this very timid person, shy and reserved.  I knew that underneath was a strong, powerful person because of the way she was singing.” McCann would later write, in the liner notes for Flack’s first album: “It was a good thing that I found a seat before she took her place at the piano and sang her first note, because my knees would never have made it standing. 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.” McCann told Flack, “I’ve just signed with Atlantic Records and I’m going to call them — goddamn, they don’t know what they’re missing.”

McCann contacted producer Joel Dorn at the label and urged him to catch one of Flack’s shows. Dorn had worked with John Coltrane, Otis Redding, Eddie Harris, Yusef Lateef, Charles Mingus, Herbie Mann, Max Roach, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the Allman Brothers, and McCann—all of them men. According to Dorn, in an interview that appears in “Roberta”, he told McCann, “I’ve heard about Roberta Flack before. Leave me alone. I don’t want any chick singers. They’re a problem, a hassle. You want to record her, Daddy, you record her. I just don’t want to record any female vocalists.” But, said Dorn, “Les McCann didn’t want to know about ‘no’ for an answer. So I said, ‘Fine, I’ll send her a contract.’” McCann went back to Mister Henry’s again, “running up the steps with a tape recorder,” recalled Flack. “I had just finished a set and I was walking back, but he said, ‘Get your ass right back up there now. Atlantic Records is interested and I’m going to record you while it’s hot.”

Dorn gave a rather different account to Jason King in “The Sound of Velvet Melting.” King wrote: “Dorn claimed that on the night he went to see Flack perform there were only about ‘nine people in the bar,’ including four [customers] ‘sitting at a table together,’ arguing loudly through the performance. When Flack sang ‘Do What You Gotta Do’—just her sitting at the piano—the four fell into rapt silence and, when she finished singing, they gave her a standing ovation. Dorn found it ‘really weird to see a standing ovation in an empty club’ and he knew he wanted to sign her.”

In any event, Dorn was now fully committed. He heard not only Flack’s mesmeric voice, but also how that voice integrated diverse musical forms. He said, “We want people who buy James Brown records and Andre Segovia records to buy Roberta Flack records. We hear all of that in her.”

“I’d never heard my voice recorded,” said Flack. “Never heard my piano recorded. They said, ‘Come to New York, and we want you just to go into the studio. We’ll set you up.’” Dorn wanted to create the effect of a live audience for Flack as she sang, so he had somebody bring in around thirty or more regulars from another D.C. club, so she could respond to listeners. “We went in,” she said. “I recorded forty songs. The ten or eleven songs that are on that album were from that. They called that album First Take because I did them in one take.”

First Take, released in June 1969, expressed a different temperament of music. It didn’t cry a blue and feverish cry, like Aretha Franklin’s Soul ’69 did—though in tracks like “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” (a Leonard Cohen cover), “Our Ages or Our Hearts” (a Donny Hathaway song about lovers driven apart by their disparate ages) and “Ballad of the Sad Young Men” (a lament about lonely gay men from a 1959 musical, The Nervous Set), First Take cried plenty. And though the music didn’t have the hard-hitting, on-the-one beat that James Brown was perfecting in that era, it did open with an insinuating funk-jazz track, Eugene McDaniels’ “Compared to What,” that became legendary, both musically and politically. (Jason King called it “a sardonic…protest tune.”) First Take created its own milieu—a surprising mix that included folk music covers; rapturous ballads; a Spanish-tongue elegy about racial prejudice, “Angelitos Negros” (Flack would introduce it onstage by asking: “Painters, why do you always paint white virgins? Paint beautiful black angels.”); and “Tryin’ Times,” a song about Black suffering that was also a plea for conciliation written by Flack’s Howard University friend, Donny Hathaway. The album didn’t fit any niche of musical genre. It wasn’t soul, but it was. It wasn’t pop, but it was. It wasn’t folk or gospel or funk, though it was all those things. Like Nina Simone, Roberta Flack was comfortable with diverse genres. As a result, she became something of a genre unto herself.

Flack herself would later express misgivings about First Take. “Joel was new to producing,” she said. Dorn, in fact, had overdubbed other instruments—including string sections—onto Flack’s raw recordings. “I just knew that [some of the album] wasn’t right, and I sat up in that studio and cried, said ‘No, that’s not right, the strings are not in tune, the horns are not in tune.’ When I think of what I’ve tried to work for, musically, when I think of the standards I’ve tried to reach…” But Flack was too hard on the album. First Take enjoyed good critical reception but not much commercial success—at least not at first. Still, it was a protean debut, and its standing only grew with time.

An expanded 50th anniversary edition, from 2021, made plain how considerable the album’s native sessions—those forty-some tracks Flack recorded as first takes over three days in February 1969—had been. Among the newly released tracks was a nine minute-plus tour de force of Mongo Santamaria’s “Afro Blue,” the first jazz standard built on African cross rhythms. It had been previously apotheosized by John Coltrane in 1963. Flack’s own take breathed and pulsed as if it was born on the spot—which it was. “Ron Carter sat there,” Flack said, “and just created stuff around me. I had never worked with anybody like Ron Carter. I just trembled when I met him. He said, ‘Listen, it’s cool,’ in such a nonchalant way. ‘Just play what you want to play,’ and then he built that all around me.” Flack’s “Afro Blue” is proof that, had she chosen to, she could have proved a major free-form and funk-informed female jazz figure, something American music hadn’t yet seen. As it was, she worked with several noteworthy jazz musicians and arrangers during her early Atlantic years, including saxophonist King Curtis, pianist Richard Tee, flautist Hubert Laws, drummer Bernard Purdie, horn and string arranger Eumir Deodato, and guitarists Bucky Pizzarelli and Eric Gale.

She rendered a similar jazz epic on a later album with a version of Bonnie Bramlett and Leon Russell’s “Superstar,” a song made famous by The Carpenters. Like “Afro Blue,” Flack’s “Superstar”—which stretched out in unbelievably inventive and soulful strides for fifteen minutes—remained unheard for fifty years.

Flack had begun her recording career at age 32, after decades of classical study, of teaching music, of accompanying opera singers, then becoming a club draw who was a living library of diverse musical forms. Now, as a recording artist, she would make a series of stellar albums before the world caught up with her art. In August 1970, she released Chapter Two, and in November 1971, Quiet Fire. Both albums were of a piece with First Take’s mix of transmogrified folk renditions, sublime adaptations of Broadway musical songs, revelatory takes on familiar pop and soul and gospel musings, and social reflections that were part woe, part protest and part hope. Despite the range of material, there was a unity to be found in Flack’s approach: some of it was tonal—that sound of subdued ardor that she was newly defining—but the unity also bore witness to her musical ethos. Flack said many times over the years that her song choices were rooted in her conviction about portraying stories in her music, whether about loves, lives or politics. “My music,” she told Ann Powers in 2020, “is inspired thought by thought, and feeling by feeling. Not note by note. I tell my own story in each song as honestly as I can in the hope that each person can hear it and feel their own story within those feelings.”

As a result, Flack wasn’t merely covering somebody else’s compositions because she liked their words and music. What she was doing made her something of an active partner in the songs she chose. In her version of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” on Quiet Fire, Flack’s spacing of the chords on the piano became both the figurative and actual bridge in the song—the support that carried her voice over that bridge, and her voice embodied a promise of ministration. In Bob Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman,” she sang it from two perspectives—not just from the outside, as Dylan did, talking to the woman in a way that was loving, hurt and accusing all at once. She also sang it from inside the story, taking the part of the woman who was the object in the song’s title: “I take just like a woman/I make love just like a woman/And I ache just like a woman/ I break like a little girl.” It made for a completely different and affecting account of the song. The voice singing the song, and the song’s object, are one and the same, and she admits to being broken.

As she was working these wonders, Flack was expanding the definition of popular music—how the form carried its feelings, how it burned. Some critics dismissed Flack’s manner as not being raw soul. But in fact, Flack was taking pop, folk and Black forms and melding them into a kind of chamber soul—a music made for close communications.

Flack once said: “I am not a Black person who sounds anything like Aretha Franklin or anything like Chaka Khan. I know what I am, and I don’t want to, and I shouldn’t have to change in order to be who I am…. I’m not interested in developing a growl so I can join the ranks of several rhythm and blues artists. Nor am I interested in developing a pure white tone so I can sell records to people who buy Olivia Newton-John.”

Because Flack’s tone could be quiet, and her voice tender, she was often seen as a romantic singer, which she of course was. But in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Roberta Flack was also keenly attuned to the times’ political moments, and to Black hardship. She befriended Black radical Angela Davis while Davis was still in jail, awaiting trial for conspiracy charges (she was acquitted), and marched with Rev. Jesse Jackson (she and Joel Dorn also co-wrote a song with Jackson, “Go Up Moses”). She also appeared in a documentary film, Save the Children, about Jackson’s Operation PUSH exhibition in Chicago in 1972, and appeared at Bob Dylan’s 1975 benefit for boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, wrongfully convicted of murder.

Roberta Flack knew what her people had been subjected to, but she also knew there were better possibilities. “I grew up,” she said, “at a time ‘Black’ was the most derogatory word you could use. I went through the civil rights movement. I learned, long after leaving Black Mountain, that being Black was a positive thing, as all of us did, the most positive thing we could be.  I did a lot of songs that were considered protest songs, a lot of folk music… But I protested as a singer with a lot of love.”

Says Angela Davis, in Roberta, “Music was a space to feel solidarity. It was a part of creating a sense of self-respect, and possibility. Yes, we needed the songs that were loud, that convinced us we were doing the right thing, that we needed to keep on pushing. They were incorporated into the soundtrack of the movement. But change happens when people’s emotions are affected. When we begin to be active participants from the heart…. Roberta had brought a kind of reflectiveness, a space to actually think and imagine.”

Flack herself once told an interviewer: “I want to be a singer… not just a Black singer. I am Black. I grew up in a lower middle-class black home. I think black is beautiful but there is so much gorgeous music in the world that has nothing to do with Black.”

Flack’s early albums enjoyed respectable success but not formidable popularity. Her label wasn’t always sure how to promote her, and radio wasn’t always clear where hard-to-categorize sound figured in. Her first few singles didn’t chart at all, and her December 1971 cover of “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow”—written in 1960 by Carole King and Gerry Goffin for the Shirelles— only rose as high as number 76 on Billboard’s Hot 100. However, a pair of singles made with singer and pianist Donny Hathaway—a rendition of Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend,” and a deep soul delivery of the Righteous Brothers’ 1964 hit “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling”—began to yield breakthroughs for both artists.

Hathaway, like Flack, was brilliantly talented and bristling with artistic possibilities—a “soul legend,” Rolling Stone later called him. He studied music at Howard University, where he met Flack, and where he formed a jazz trio. Hathaway and Flack liked working together—he wrote and arranged songs for her on her early albums—and their duets proved exceptional. If Flack sometimes seemed to pray as she sang, Hathaway sometimes seemed to keen.

When Atlantic’s Jerry Wexler, who had remarkable instincts, heard Flack sing Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend” at Mr. Henry’s one night in Washington D.C., he was impressed by the emotional intelligence of her reading, and had an inspiration: Since it was a song about affinity, shouldn’t she and Hathaway—whose voices had striking affinity—record a duet of the song? Wexler had no trouble convincing the artists to team up for a full-fledged effort, produced by Joel Dorn and jazz producer Arif Mardin. The new album, Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway, recorded throughout much of 1971, was slated, along with its first single, “Where Is the Love,” for release near the middle of 1972. It was anticipated that this was the music that would certainly elevate the destinies of both artists—and that did happen. But something unexpected happened first.

Actor Clint Eastwood was driving on a Los Angeles freeway one day in 1971, on his way to work on the last stages of his first film as a director, Play Misty for Me, a psychological thriller about love, jealousy and madness, starring Eastwood, Jessica Walter and Donna Mills. Flack’s recording of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” played on the radio on a jazz station. (Eastwood himself was a jazz pianist.) He hadn’t heard it before and pulled off the freeway, so he could concentrate on it. The performance, the spellbinding voice, he said, “hypnotized” him. Flack sang the romantic epiphany as if it were a devotional. Eastwood decided this was the ideal song to center Play Misty for Me.  He felt that it brought something necessary to the film he’d made about a jazz radio disc jockey who got caught up in a dangerous love affair. He later said, “I thought, yeah, this tells the story.”

Eastwood, though, wasn’t looking for music to underscore the film’s tension or fright. Rather, he wanted something that would frame the love that was the true object of the story, the love that saved the DJ. He wanted “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” with Flack’s pensive vocal, to accompany the scene where that redemptive romance occurs. He got in touch with Joel Dorn, Roberta’s producer, who recalled Eastwood telling him: “I want to use that song in the montage that the whole movie builds to. But I only have a thousand dollars [to offer for rights to use the recording].” Dorn understood right away that there was a much greater benefit in the offing. He told Eastwood, “You can have it for a thousand cents. It’s going to be in a movie.”

Flack’s introduction to “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” came from a 1963 album by a folk-gospel duo, Joe and Eddie (who were background singers for Harry Belafonte). She liked the song enough that she taught it to young girls at Banneker High School in Washington D.C. She also regularly performed it when she played at Mr. Henry’s. “It was one of the songs I was very connected with,” she said, “when it came to choosing tracks for my first recording project. The tempo and arrangement of the song came as a part of the way I felt the story of the song: When you express your feelings about the first time you ever see a great love, you don’t rush the story.” She also said: “The most artistic part of my soul lends itself to that kind of song and that kind of melody that is so haunting and so beautiful and so soft and so spiritual.”

After she’d recorded her version of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” in 1969, Dorn suggested to Roberta re-recording it at a slightly faster tempo with a lyric edit, in order to trim the running time (it ran 5:22). Flack wouldn’t agree. She later recalled: “Joel said, ‘Okay, you don’t care if it’s a hit or not?’ I said: ‘No sir.’ Of course, he was right for three years, until Clint got it.”

When Eastwood called Flack at her home in Virginia, she was unsure at first. Then Eastwood said, “I’d use it in the only part of the movie where there’s absolute love.” Flack agreed to that, but by now she worried that Dorn may have been right about the track’s slowness and length. She said, “I want to do it over again. It’s too slow.” Or at least, she suggested, she’d want to take out the first eight bars, to make the song move faster. “You don’t need that piano,” she told him. Eastwood replied, “No, I want every note, every breath.” Dorn said, “It goes into the movie.” Said Bill Eaton, Roberta’s arranger: “If that hadn’t happened, she might have spent her lifetime singing at Mr. Henry’s.” Atlantic issued it as a single in January 1972. “And,” said Eaton, “the world kicked the doors down.”

“Clint was pivotal and extremely important for my career,” says Flack. “A lot of people don’t know he’s an excellent musician, a jazz musician.”

“The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” was the rarest kind of success: a glacially-paced reverie about the rapture of love that moved to the top of Billboard’s Hot 100—and stayed there for six weeks in the spring of 1972. It also ranked as the number 1 song on Billboard’s year-end charts, and went on to win the GRAMMY Awards for Song of the Year and Record of the Year. It became the fundament of the quiet storm style. Then, on December 15, 1972, Flack’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” made an otherworldly appearance as the wake-up music for the astronauts aboard Apollo 17, on the last day that humans visited the Moon for over 50 years. It played as a tribute to the face of the moonscape below the capsule.

The single’s success revivified First Take. The album, now three years old, became a No. 1 Billboard album in 1972, and was also that year’s top seller. It also helped lift “Where Is the Love,” the first single from Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway, to the No. 5 slot on singles’ charts after its release in April, and similarly lifted the duet album to a No. 5 position on the album chart a few weeks later. Looking back, in May 2022 at Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway on the occasion of the album’s 50^th anniversary, Brandon Ousley wrote at Albumism: “In every way, Flack and Hathaway epitomized the very essence of Black love, right at the height of the Black Power movement. For them, love was more than a spiritual and romantic force that lingers throughout mankind. It was a political emblem that solidified the strength and vibrancy of the Black experience.”

This began what was perhaps the most intense period in Flack’s career, both artistically and commercially, and nothing better illustrates that and Roberta Flack’s ability to hear and transform songs—than the story of her 1973 hit, “Killing Me Softly with His Song,” which came to be seen as among the most defining achievements of her career. “Killing Me Softly” is something of an odd song, and its history is a bit complicated, even disputed. It was written by Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel, in collaboration with folksinger Lori Lieberman, who recorded the song in 1971.

Flack came across “Killing Me Softly with His Song” on a transcontinental flight, where Lieberman’s recording appeared on the in-flight audio program. Roberta later said: “The title, of course, smacked me in the face. I immediately pulled out some scratch paper, made musical staves.” She said she played “the song at least eight to ten times, jotting down the melody that I heard.” Flack later rehearsed the song in Bob Marley’s Tuff Gong Studios in Kingston, Jamaica. In September 1972, she was opening for Quincy Jones at Los Angeles’s Greek Theater, and after finishing her encore, Jones told her she should do another. “I said, ‘Well, I have this new song I’ve been working on.’ So, I started in, ’Strumming my pain with his fingers…’ After I finished, the audience would not stop screaming. And Quincy said, ‘Ro, don’t sing that daggone song no more, until you record it.’” Flack released her version in January 1973, and it spent several weeks at No. 1 during the following months, more weeks than any other record in 1973. Billboard placed it as the No. 3 song for 1973. “Killing Me Softly with His Song” won Flack her second Song of the Year and Record of the Year GRAMMY Awards, making her the first artist ever to capture those honors two years in a row.

Lieberman and Gimbel and Fox later bitterly disputed who had the right to claim having truly written the song, but Flack’s defining performance defined another kind of authorship. Clearly, she responded—strongly—to something she heard in Lori Lieberman’s recording of “Killing Me Softly with His Song.” Whereas Lieberman felt that Don McLean spoke to something inside her, as if he was reading her innermost reality, something in Lieberman’s delivery also read, and awakened, something in Flack. She didn’t merely interpret the song; she inhabited it, became a part of it. Flack was a preternatural interpreter. She heard something in another’s delivery of a song that awakened in her a way to connect – to understand and translate—the song’s internal life for others. She heard and made something luminous in Ewan MacColl’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” that even MacColl and Peggy Seeger didn’t actualize, though nobody had been closer to that song than them. Except Roberta Flack.

One of Flack’s model singers was Frank Sinatra, whose art of song was his ability to make a lyric work as the expression of something he needed to tell you—something about himself—as if he were talking to you alone, in the close quarters of a room, not from a stage or record. In her own singing, Flack did something a bit different. She didn’t seem to be telling us so much about her own secrets. Rather, she sang in a way that could get at the secret of the song itself, and how that song’s undisclosed aspect spoke to something in us. Flack also illuminated that ineffable way that songs—in their deepest magic—so often speak to us in ways that make us feel understood and less alone. Frank Sinatra sang to us as if he was sharing something about himself that he needed to express, something that helped get him through the night, and it was an extraordinary thing to hear. By contrast, Flack, in so many of her interpretations, sang in ways that recognized the listener. That is, Flack heard not only how someone was singing to her, but she also heard the person (or persons) that she was singing to. A song’s author isn’t necessarily the only writer; the singer can be the person who hears the song in ways that expand its meaning. The key to Flack’s achievement with “Killing Me Softly with His Song” was also a revelation about how she listened to singers and the songs they sang, whether they wrote them or not. That connection to a song was everything: It was that ability to make that connection that elevated Roberta Flack’s artistry. (In 1996, the Fugees reworked “Killing Me Softly with His Song” on their debut album, with Lauryn Hill singing lead vocal. At that year’s MTV Movie Awards, Flack joined the Fugees to sing the song with them.)

Not long after “Killing Me Softly With His Song”, Flack came to realize that the pace of her success was now demanding a lot of her. “I was recording,” she said, “and I was doing concerts, doing television, and I sort of overloaded myself. It suddenly dawned on me that I was tired. So, I decided to pull back just a minute. I decided I would try doing one of these things at a time.” She decided she herself would produce her next album, 1975’s Feel Like Makin’ Love, (under the name Rubina Flake, a childhood alter-ego of Flack’s). “I found it a very exciting experience,” she said in an interview after the album’s release. “I wanted to determine a little bit more what those buttons on the console meant, in terms of the art I’m trying to give to the people. Because you can work up a piece of music and then get in the studio and they can give it a completely different sound then. [I decided] you need to know something about what you’re doing. All of the artistic input that I gave to this last album, I’ve always given to my other albums. I played the piano, I sang all the songs, I did all the arrangements—the basic arrangements, rhythm arrangements. I had everything to say about everything that went on. I’ve always done that, even though I have not been given credit.”

Flack also said, “When you assert your own ability to make a final decision you are of course categorized. In most instances you are called, very simply, a bitch. As a black woman it goes a step further, even. To actually get back there and push the buttons on the console and to make the decisions, to tell men what to do, takes a lot of courage. In that sense, I probably made some inroads for other women to do what I have done.” Angela Davis (who authored Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday), said in Roberta: “What would the music be like if it had not been so thoroughly influenced by a patriarchy? Roberta refused to accept the idea that women’s contributions would always be limited.” Many critics noted that, beginning with Feel Like Makin’ Love, Flack’s music began to sound different. “She now prefers a more overtly black style — a dreamy, repetitive, gently jazzish kind of chant,” wrote John Rockwell in The New York Times in 1977, in a review of a nightclub appearance.

Flack’s 1978 album, “Blue Lights in the Basement” went to No. 8 on Billboard’s Top 200, and its single, the dream-like “The Closer I Get to You”—another duet with Donny Hathaway—sailed to No. 2 on Billboard’s pop chart. The song was perhaps the pinnacle of Flack and Hathaway’s joint artistry. There was no doubt about it: a wide allure resulted when the two singers joined voices. Their first album together, Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway, immediately established the pair among the best duos popular music had ever produced. Though they were not lovers, they accomplished bonds of love in how their voices interconnected. “When they team up,” says professor and critic Emily Lordi, who has written about Flack as well as Hathaway, “they amplify each other’s star power. They brought out the best in each other.”

In 1979, Flack and Hathaway entered Atlantic studios to make another album of duets, but the intervening years since their first LP had been difficult for Hathaway. In 1971, at a peak of his creativity, Hathaway was diagnosed with severe depression and paranoid schizophrenia.  His instability not only disrupted his music career but also his relationships with others. He and Flack grew apart for a long time, but Flack later said, “I tried to reach out to Donny. That’s how we managed to do [‘The Closer I Get to You’]. I knew he was sick. But when he sat down at that piano and sang for me it was like it was eight or nine years ago because he sang and played his ass off.” Hathaway had been in too much mental disarray to attend the song’s recording session, so Flack and her band cut the track in New York and Hathaway added his vocal at home in Chicago. The song signified the duo’s reconciliation. Flack figured their work on the new album would also help Hathaway.

But they didn’t get very far. By January 13, 1979, they had recorded just two duets, “Back Together Again” and “You Are My Heaven.” Hathaway sang well on that latter song, but then began acting delusional.  Producer Eric Mercury realized the sessions could not continue and sent the musicians home for the day. Flack said: “I knew that [Donny] was not well.”

Flack took Hathaway to her apartment in New York’s Dakota for a meal. She later said, “I keep a light in my living room on all the time, because Donny, that’s the last piano he played. He had written a song called ‘Lift My Spirits,’ and he had not been writing for several years, and he started playing that song. He came into the kitchen and said, ‘Come here and listen to this,’ and I ran with an apron on and listened.” After their visit, Flack said, “I went back to the hotel [the Essex House] with him… Dropped him off. He said ‘Goodbye, see you later. See you tomorrow.’” Flack related that Hathaway had told her “that he didn’t think he could sing anymore in his life.”

Hours later, Hathaway’s body was found on the pavement outside the Essex House. Investigators concluded that Donny Hathaway had leaped to his death, a suicide. He was 33 years old.

Flack was devastated. In television interviews, when the subject of Hathaway’s death came up, she sometimes looked as if she was reeling from a blow. She had wanted to believe that Hathaway had a chance. “He could have been Mozart,” she said in 2014. “Mozart had a lot of Donny, and Donny had a lot of Mozart in him, in that they were both supremely gifted, but very, very insecure about how to make that gift available to the world.” On another occasion she said, “Donny was a musical genius, and I don’t use that word often or lightly. I don’t know if he would have been bigger than Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye, but he would have been as big.” Flack resumed work on the album, and though it was now effectively a solo work, she entitled it Roberta Flack Featuring Donny Hathaway which was released in 1980. She included the two duets they had recorded. “You Are My Heaven” (co-written by Stevie Wonder and producer Eric Mercury), was the last song Hathaway ever sang, on the day of his death.  The duets recorded by Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway stand today as the “gold standard” of R & B, alongside Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell, James Ingram & Patti Austin, Ashford and Simpson.

For years, Richard Pryor had long wanted to collaborate with Flack and enlisted her to write, produce and record the soundtrack to his film “Bustin’ Loose” in which he starred with Cicely Tyson.  Flack collaborated on this soundtrack with Luther Vandross and soul balladeer Peabo Bryson.  The “Bustin’ Loose” soundtrack is the largest body of work that Flack composed and showcases her abilities as Producer, Arranger and Songwriter.  Out of circulation for decades, high demand from her fans motivated Flack to re-master the soundtrack, which was digitally re-released in 2021.

In December 1980, Roberta and Peabo recorded and released a double album Live & More.  Two of their duets on the album charted on Billboard’s R & B chart, “Make the World Stand Still” and “Love is a Waiting Game”, continuing to demonstrate the electricity and synergy they had together in Bustin’ Loose.  Their second volume of duets on Capitol Records, Born to Love, in 1983, included “Tonight I Celebrate My Love” which was their first duet to break the Billboard top 100, peaking at 2 in November 1983 and charting on multiple charts in the US and worldwide.

Oasis, released in 1988 was Roberta Flack’s next solo album, including #1 US single “Oasis” (R & B) and “Uh-uh Ooh-ooh Look Out (Here It Comes)”, a #1 song (Dance/Club music charts) penned by pals Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson. “Set the Night to Music” was released in 1991, featuring a duet with Maxi Priest, that peaked at #2 on Billboard’s Hot 100 and charting internationally across multiple genres.

Throughout her career, Flack continued to break boundaries for women in production, taking the position of Producer, which was heavily male-dominated for most of her albums from 1975 on.  Despite the criticism from record labels and industry standards, she persevered, producing and arranging with increased success and maintaining a level of control over her music previously elusive to female musicians.  Now acknowledged as a trailblazer, Flack’s body of work as a Producer demonstrates her deep understanding, vision and actualization of the music she recorded.

Let it Be Roberta:  Roberta Flack Sing the Beatles (2012), was the last album of original recordings the singer released. It was perhaps an inevitable ultimate place for Flack to arrive at in her music career. In 2012, she told NPR: “When I considered how I started, made the transition from the classroom to the little stage in the clubs that I worked in, in Washington, D.C., the music that was on the radio was not mine. It was the music of the Beatles. I love the simplicity, the fact that they’re so accessible. The thing that just overwhelms me is how these young musicians were able to write so deeply and so intensely and to be so correct that here we are talking about it all these years later. People all over the world know the songs. They still know them.” The Beatles’ music, like Flack’s, remains timeless, which in part makes her so well-suited to understand the longevity of their music.

In addition, Flack was a good friend with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. They were next door neighbors in the Dakota, sharing a wall that opened into a kitchen.  Flack could sometimes hear them playing music. In 1984, Flack recorded a version of Ono’s song “Goodbye Sadness” for the album Every Man Has a Woman, which was made as a tribute to the artist for her 50th birthday. Ono said she thought Flack’s voice transformed the core of “Goodbye Sadness” with how she sang it. “Mine,” said Ono, “was trying to go away from sorrow. But in her song, it really sounds like ‘goodbye, sadness,’ and you really feel that it’s gone.” Ono has also said of Flack, “She has the capacity to take songs as a tool to express herself, but each time she does that, it becomes Roberta.” (Yoko Ono wrote the liner notes for Let It Be Roberta.)

Let It Be Roberta is, indeed, one of the finer examples of how Flack could take others’ songs and imbue them with her sensibility and make them reveal something new, which, when it comes to the Beatles’ music, proved a singular feat. The Beatles’ own versions of their songs are so embedded in the modern mind that when we hear a Beatles cover, we can’t help but hear the Beatles’ original version in our memory. But that’s not what necessarily happens under Roberta Flack’s treatment. In Let It Be Roberta (made up of eleven John Lennon-Paul McCartney compositions and George Harrison’s non-Beatles song, “Isn’t It a Pity”), Flack configured the music in her own terms, sometimes bringing shifts to melodies or reframing parts of harmonic structure, or interjecting different rhythms than we might expect. Which is to say, she sometimes inverted the expectations we might have about the material.

For example, one wouldn’t expect “I Should Have Known Better” to yield any surprises, but in Flack’s hands it became a whole new—and beguiling—entity. Similarly, some of her adaptations proved wholly surprising. You might not immediately recognize the Beatles’ “If I Fell,” “And I Love Him (Her),” “I’m Looking Through You,” “Here, There and Everywhere” and “Isn’t a Pity” in Flack’s accounts of the songs. These are selections that found new shapes on Let It Be Roberta, and new paces. Their lyrics were contemplated differently, creating new ways of looking at the songs.

In addition, “Oh Darling” became a blues implored, late-night, dimly lit bar ballad. “I channeled Ray Charles, moving from side to side when I was singing to get that groove,” she told the Wall Street Journal. And “Hey Jude” became an extraordinary departure from the Beatles’ epic without being showy, as it proved in the original’s larger-than-life coda. It’s just the opposite. Flack dropped the coda altogether, which made “Hey Jude” more intimate, and made the singer also seem like another participant in the song who might need to “take a sad song and make it better.” She said, “I decided to leave out the la-la-la-la’s at the end. They’re lovely vowels to sing and verbalize, but I wanted my interpretation to be quieter and more sentimental.”

One could possibly claim that Flack’s interpretation of Beatles’ songs also became a kind of authorship, as it did in her readings of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” and “Killing Me Softly with His Song.” At the same time, the Beatles’ audience always took part in that band’s songs. In a sense, the Beatles’ listeners completed those songs, finding meanings of their own in the words and music of John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison—and sometimes those meanings weren’t the ones the songwriters intended. When songs are released into the world, they can take on lives of their own. Roberta Flack is proof of that, repeatedly shepherding other people’s songs to be born anew.

In her later years, Flack also focused on causes she felt passionate about. She went full-circle in her commitment to education, having spent 10 years as a teacher in the Washington DC public school system after graduating from Howard University and prior to her first record deal with Atlantic Records.  Her ability to inspire her students is a legacy unto itself, as she has former students write to her even now, telling them how her lessons changed the way they saw the world and helped them to open their lives up to possibility.  Throughout her life, Flack continued to educate and inspire.  She mentored numerous talented musicians, encouraging, challenging and providing opportunities for them to “step into the spotlight”.  Donny Hathaway, Luther Vandross, Peabo Bryson, Marcus Miller, Gwen Guthrie, Patti Austin, Bernard Wright, Jerry and Katreese Barnes, Davell Crawford are just a few of the many musicians whose lives were forever changed because of her influence.  In 2006, with her manager Suzanne Koga, Roberta founded The Roberta Flack School of Music, that provided free music education to underprivileged students in the Bronx. In 2010, she established the Roberta Flack Foundation, whose mission statement is to support music education and animal welfare. The foundation awarded its first grants in 2019. One grant went to Anasa Troutman’s Shelectricity, a first-of-its kind, digitally-enabled ecosystem to empower adolescent girls of color in the United States to reach their full potential and thrive. Another went to Carol Swainson, Head of School at San Francisco Schoolhouse, who directed a documentary for school communities with the goal of empowering families to feel safe in discussing their racial biases and thereby changing the negative racial narrative through their children and their own actions.

With longtime friend Londel McMillan, she became an active participant in the Artist Empowerment Coalition, whose primary goal is advocacy for artists’ rights and control of their creative properties. As a Black woman who’d come to assert control over her own music production, she knew the value of such advocacy. She was a spokeswoman for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), and donated use of her hit “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” in the organization’s commercials for years.

Though 2012’s Let It Be Roberta was Flack’s last album release, she began to perform live more frequently, starting in 2008, often appearing with symphony orchestras, both stateside and internationally. She played songs from across the breadth of her career. Following an exceptional concert in Barbados with her band on January 16, 2016, Flack suffered a stroke that ended her performing career.  The stroke affected her voice, but she continued to do interviews—quite a few, by way of e-mail—and she stayed active in other ways, overseeing expanded releases of her early music, writing a children’s book, The Green Piano: How Little Me Found Music, about the piano that her father restored for her and what she learned from the instrument. “He painted it green, and it smelled bad, but I played and practiced for untold hours on that piano,” she told People in February 2022. “It gave me wings of music that as a 9-year-old girl I needed so badly. I’ve been knocked down so many times, but I keep trying.” Though she could no longer perform, at age 85, she still hoped to see her fans. “The pandemic has kept most of us off the stage for two years,” she told the magazine. “I don’t know what the next few years will hold, but I hope to see my fans in person sometime soon.”

Flack also participated actively in the making of Antonino D’Ambrosio’s documentary, Roberta.  Released on PBS American Masters in December 2022, the film is the most comprehensive and definitive of the four (4) documentaries about the life and career of Roberta Flack, capturing her limitless capacity to strive toward personal excellence, her elegant approach to her music and deep commitment to using her music to enrich and better the world.

In 2020, the Recording Academy presented Flack with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 62nd Annual GRAMMY Awards ceremony, at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. Flack attended and received not just the award but expressions of love and gratitude from generational spans of artists. Lizzo, Lady Gaga, Joni Mitchell, Ava DuVernay, Babyface, Alicia Keys, Demi Lovato, Ariana Grande, Khalid, Rashida Jones, Debbie Allen, Cyndi Lauper, Usher, Kenny G, Trombone Shorty and Chick Corea were among those who visited with the singer to pay their respects. “It was overwhelming and breathtaking to be there,” Flack later said. “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.” She also told Forbes, in 2021, “Being recognized was so moving in that I was taken in and honored by young artists and that my music touches and continues to inspire change and growth.” Indeed, the gratitude offered by younger artists amounted to a testament. “We should think of part of Roberta Flack’s legacy as the way in which her music gets taken up again and again by younger artists over the decades,” said Jason King in Roberta. “She’s in the DNA of popular music. You know, the story goes on and on. Being so heavily sampled in hip hop music, for instance. Her music kind of refuses to die.”

These were all fitting tributes. Roberta Flack, who knew how to listen to singers but also knew how to sing to us in ways that recognized the listener, was being told by other singers that they understood her, that they had learned something about singing and listening from what she had done with songs over the years. In that same Forbes interview, Flack also said, “I’ve always tried to express myself musically from a place of complete honesty in the hope that each person can find his or her own story when they listen in a way that helps them to feel their own truth.”

In November 2022, a spokesperson for Flack confirmed that the singer was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, and was being treated in a hospital. The disease, the press release said, “has made it impossible to sing and not easy to speak.” ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a rare degenerative disease that causes progressive paralysis of the muscles.  Her indominable spirit has never been stronger, as she sings in the song “Running”, (2019) for a film 3100: Run and Become. “I’ll just keep running, till my race is done.  And if I just keep running, then I’ve already won”.

In 2024, engineer and producer, Ebonie Smith, created an album of poetry and song, On Imagination, and featured “She Came Home Blameless”, a poem by Maya Angelou, read by Roberta’s longtime friend Valerie Simpson with a spiritual sung by Roberta from her last recording entitled “Down By The River”.

Her legacy, it is clear, will reach far into the future.  On May 13, 2023, Flack was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Berklee College of Music.  Celebrated by members of the graduating class who performed a concert of her music, Flack said in a speech that her former student, background singer and dear friend Gabrielle Goodman read on her behalf, “I wish that I could meet each of you, but through my words, know that I love you and am so proud of you.  Your future lies ahead of you and is as bright as you are.”  A resounding standing ovation, towards the cameras that casted the event to Flack in her New York apartment, was the reply.

Ann Powers, in Roberta, said, as photos of Lauryn Hill, Tracy Chapman, Alicia Keys, India.Arie, Norah Jones and Diana Krall, among others, showed onscreen, of Flack’s lasting impact on younger female artists: “I really hear her influence all over.  There are so many great women vocalists who are building their own songbooks without any fear of crossing boundaries. They take as their model the freedom that Roberta established as her norm.”

Finding your own story in how somebody sings to you—that’s what Roberta Flack did for us, for so long. She helped us hear our own stories, and she gave countless musicians a model for how to relate their own stories by way of singing.

At Roberta’s end, in archival footage, Flack said: “If I have to use one phrase to describe how I feel about the whole experience, it would simply be that Love is a Song and an honest giving of feelings and emotions. As a performer, if you can connect to that thought, then whatever the song is, it’s a success. It’s not like I’m trying to sound like somebody else or be somebody else. I’m happy to be Roberta Flack. I’m happy to sound like I do. So that feels good. I mean, I’m very satisfied with that.”

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