R.I.P. Roberta Flack, “Killing Me Softly With His Song” singer

Born in Black Mountain, North Carolina in 1937 and raised in Arlington, Virginia, Flack grew up in a musical family. Her mother played organ at the Lomax African Methodist Episcopal Church while her father pursued the piano on the side of his career as a draftsman. Flack first came to appreciate and understand music in the church, especially the more classical style liturgies and works from Handel and Chopin. By the time she was a teenager, she was accompanying the church herself. Flack attended Howard University at age 15, and eventually taught music in public schools.

In the 1960s, Flack was working in Washington D.C. accompanying opera singers at the Tivoli Opera Restaurant. She began singing pop songs on her own in between the opera acts, and audiences were hooked. Her reputation in the D.C. area only grew in esteem, and eventually, with some help from jazz pianist Les McCann, Flack signed to Atlantic Records. Her first album, First Take, was released in 1969, though Flack later pushed back against some of the album’s recording techniques. The album was a sleeper hit, with single “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” topping the Hot 100 nearly three years later in 1972. 

As her visibility grew in the 1970s, Flack also aligned herself with political causes, befriending Angela Davis while Davis was jailed, and marching with Reverend Jesse Jackson. “I grew up at a time ‘Black’ was the most derogatory word you could use. I went through the civil rights movement,” Flack once said, per her reps. “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.”

In 2006, Flack and her manager Suzanne Koga founded the Roberta Flack School Of Music, which provided free education to students in the Bronx. Four years later, she established the Roberta Flack Foundation to support music education and good treatment of animals. In 2012, Flack released her fifteenth album Let It Be: Roberta which featured renditions of Beatles songs. Though her health made it impossible for Flack to perform publicly in the final years of her life, she still continued to sing in private and music remained paramount in her life. “I didn’t try to be a soul singer, a jazz singer, a blues singer – no category,” Flack shared per The Guardian. “My music is my expression of what I feel and believe in a moment.”