NCS
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Roberta Flack, the Grammy-winning soul singer greatest recognized for her celebrated interpretations of romantic ballads like “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” in addition to her skilled collaborations and social activism, has died, in line with a press release from her publicist.
She was 88.
Flack died Monday at her house, surrounded by her household, Elaine Schock, her publicist, informed NCS. Her demise adopted a number of years of well being challenges, together with a analysis, revealed publicly in late 2022, of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. The progressive situation, also known as Lou Gehrig’s illness, made it not possible for Flack to sing, her representatives stated at the time.
Flack, nevertheless, had already long-cemented her legacy as one of many defining voices of her technology – each as an interpreter of others’ songs and a author of her personal – notching a slew of chart-topping hits and racking up accolades: Over her profession, the classically skilled daughter of a church organist secured 14 Grammy nominations and won five, including a lifetime achievement award in 2020 and back-to-back Record of the Year wins.
Questlove, drummer for The Roots, musical director for “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” and a filmmaker, paid tribute to Flack.
“Thank You Roberta Flack,” he captioned a throwback photograph of the late artist. “Rest In Melody.”
Born in Black Mountain, North Carolina, and raised in Arlington, Virginia, Flack obtained classical music coaching all through her childhood, beginning piano classes at age 9. By 15, she’d earned a scholarship to Howard University, the place she graduated in 1958 with a bachelor’s diploma in music training.
Flack taught music for a time and needed to pursue classical music – however discovered the style within the Sixties disinclined to welcome her.
“One of the hassles of being a Black female musician is that people are always backing you into a corner and telling you to sing soul,” she once told TIME. “I’m a serious artist. I feel a kinship with people like Arthur Rubinstein and Glenn Gould. If I can’t play (20th-century orchestral composer Bela) Bartok when I want to play Bartok, then nothing else matters.”
A voice instructor inspired Flack to pursue pop music as a substitute, and he or she spent nights and weekends performing in golf equipment in Washington, DC, earlier than her huge break one evening at Mr. Henry’s, the place she was found by jazz musician Les McCann. He helped land her an audition with Atlantic Records for which, the story goes, she performed greater than 40 songs over three hours.“I was so anxious and so happy, and I still am,” she informed Philadelphia Weekly a long time later, “but it was all a brand-new experience, and I probably sang too many songs.”
Her debut report, “First Take,” adopted quickly after, in 1969. It included her model of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” which was written by people singer Ewan MacColl and helped catapult Flack to superstardom after Clint Eastwood used the recording for his 1971 movie, “Play Misty for Me.” The following 12 months, it shot to the highest of the Billboard Hot 100, the place it spent six weeks at No. 1, and gained Record of the Year at the 1973 Grammy Awards.
By that point, Flack was already well-established, having launched her sophomore follow-up, “Chapter Two,” in addition to the album “Quiet Fire” and a report with Donny Hathaway, who grew to become an in depth collaborator earlier than his demise in 1979. Together they gained one other 1973 Grammy for his or her duet, “Where Is the Love.”
1973 additionally noticed Flack launch her report, “Killing Me Softly,” with the titular observe, “Killing Me Softly with His Song” – one other smash hit that spent 5 weeks at the highest of the Billboard chart. It would internet her one other two Grammy awards in 1974, for Record of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Performance by a feminine artist.
Across her profession, Flack additionally interpreted all kinds of artists, together with Leonard Cohen and The Beatles, and by her fifth solo album, “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” she’d taken over as producer – a job sometimes stuffed by males in a male-dominated business – crediting herself as Rubina Flake, her self-styled alter ego.
While her most recognizable songs might need been love songs, Flack by no means prevented complicated points: She tackled racial injustice on tracks like “Tryin’ Times,” social and financial inequality on “Compared to What” and nodded to the challenges confronted by the LGBTQ neighborhood in her model of “Ballad of the Sad Young Men.” The Rev. Jesse Jackson as soon as referred to Flack as “socially relevant and politically unafraid,” according to her website, although as an older grownup, she lamented that lots of the issues she’d confronted as a musician nonetheless festered.
“I’m deeply saddened that many of the songs I recorded 50 years ago about civil rights, equal rights, poverty, hunger and suffering in our society are still relevant in 2020,” she told AARP in 2020, acknowledging connections in her music to “the growing economic disparities, to Black Lives Matter, to police brutality, to activism versus apathy, and the need for each of us to see it and address it.”
That legacy has continued by the a long time, as Flack influenced youthful artists like Lauryn Hill and the Fugees – who launched their own celebrated version of “Killing Me Softly” in 1996 – together with Lizzo, Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande.
Whether in protest, romance or the classics, no matter theme Flack approached, “every single song I’ve recorded expressed something deep and personal to me,” she told NPR music journalist Ann Powers in 2020. “Each was my singular focus whether in the studio or on the stage.”