Roberta Flack, the singer and musician known for her chart-topping recordings of songs such as “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” “Killing Me Softly with His Song,” and “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” has died, according to her manager Suzanne Koga. She was 88.
A classically trained pianist, Flack, who was born in Black Mountain, North Carolina, in 1937 and raised in Arlington, Virginia, launched her professional music career as an accompanist in the Washington, DC area. (Before that, she worked as a schoolteacher.) With time, however, she began to perform her own sets, and expand her mostly classical repetoire to include more pop and jazz sounds.
Flack established an international reputation after Ewan MacColl’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” a song on her first album, First Take—released by Atlantic Records in 1969—was used in Clint Eastwood’s 1971 film Play Misty for Me. The track would help First Take reach number one on the Billboard charts in 1972, and win Flack the Grammy Award for record of the year in 1973.
“Like a healing blanket to wrap yourself up in, Roberta Flack’s rich and senusous blue-blue sound is currently cresting the peak which began in 1969 when she recorded ‘The First Time Ever I saw Your Face,’” Vogue reported in a short feature on Flack published in June 1973. “The woman behing the powerful piano and the warm, supple voice has a strong, warm, down-home presence which is unqiuely American. Her music soars beyond age barriers to appeal to teen-agers and to dowagers.”
She’d go on to win record of the year again in 1974 for her rendition of “Killing Me Softly with His Song,” a song composed by Charles Fox with lyrics by Norman Gimbel and Lori Lieberman.
