Outside the Beltway

Roberta Flack, 1937-2025

The R&B icon is gone at 88.

James Joyner · Monday, February 24, 2025 · 11 comments

Washington Post, “Roberta Flack, popular song stylist of the 1970s, dies at 88“

Roberta Flack, a classically trained pianist who taught in the D.C. school system before launching a singing career that made her one of the most popular performers of the 1970s, with such No. 1 hits as “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” and “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” died Feb. 24 at her home in New York City. She was 88.

The cause was complications from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, sometimes called Lou Gehrig’s disease, said her publicist Elaine Schock.

Ms. Flack was content to teach music and to accompany other vocalists on piano before she was cajoled into singing Christmas carols while appearing at a Washington nightclub in the 1960s. She eventually decided to concentrate on a music career, and her quiet, emotionally searching style soon won a growing number of fans.

Her 1969 debut album, “First Take,” contained “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” which she had taught years earlier to some of her choral students at Washington’s Banneker Junior High (now a high school). She released two more albums, “Chapter Two” and “Quiet Fire,” in 1970 and 1971, respectively, and was seemingly content with a niche following.

When Clint Eastwood was preparing to direct “Play Misty for Me,” his moody 1971 thriller about a DJ pursued by a stalker, he heard “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” on the radio. Eastwood called Ms. Flack and asked if he could use the song for a key scene in the film.

“He was so sincere,” Ms. Flack later told Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper, and “he wanted it just how it sounds. ‘Isn’t it too slow?’ I asked. He replied, ‘No, just like that, all of it.’ And he played all five minutes and 22 seconds of it. I thought, if he’s willing to do that, I must be doing something right.”

The film’s success led Ms. Flack’s record label, Atlantic, to release “First Time” as a single — shortened by about a minute. The song, written by British folk singer Ewan MacColl in 1957, had been recorded several times before, but it was Ms. Flack’s version that became a sensation.

“First Time” spent six weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart in 1972, three years after it was recorded. At the Grammy ceremonies, it won Song of the Year and Record of the Year and made Ms. Flack a star.

Her slow, deliberate recording didn’t easily fit in any of the prevailing musical styles of the time.

“I didn’t try to be a soul singer, a jazz singer, a blues singer — no category,” Ms. Flack told the Guardian. “My music is my expression of what I feel and believe in a moment.”

New York Times, “Roberta Flack, Virtuoso Singer-Pianist Who Ruled the Charts, Dies at 88“

Roberta Flack, the magnetic singer and pianist whose intimate blend of soul, jazz and folk made her one of the most popular artists of the 1970s, died on Monday in Manhattan. She was 88.

[…]

After spending almost 10 years as a Washington, D.C., schoolteacher and performing nights downtown, Ms. Flack zoomed to worldwide stardom in 1972, after her version of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” was featured in a Clint Eastwood film.

The song had been released three years earlier, on her debut album for Atlantic Records, but came out as a single only after the film was released. Within weeks it was at No. 1 on the Billboard chart — a perch she would reclaim two more times, with “Killing Me Softly With His Song” (1973) and “Feel Like Makin’ Love” (1974).

In both 1973 and ’74, she won Grammy Awards for record of the year and best pop vocal performance, and in both years the composers of her hits won for song of the year.

Ms. Flack’s steady, powerful voice could connote tenderness, pride, conviction or longing, but hardly ever despair. Most of her best-known albums included at least a few funk and soul tracks, driven by a slapping backbeat and rich with observational social commentary. But her biggest hits were always something else: slow folk ballads (“The First Time”) or mellifluous anthems (“Killing Me Softly”) or plush love songs (“Feel Like Makin’ Love”).

“Roberta Flack underplays everything with a quietness and gentleness,” the writer and folklorist Julius Lester once observed in a Rolling Stone review. “More than any singer I know, she can take a quiet, slow song (and most of hers are) and infuse it with a brooding intensity that is, at times, almost unbearable.”

Mr. Lester heard in Ms. Flack an “amazing ability to get further inside a song than one thought humanly possible and to bring responses from places inside you that you never knew existed.”

Critics often struggled to describe the understated strength of her voice, and the breadth of her stylistic range. In its poise, its interiority and conviction, its lack of sentimentality or overstatement, her singing seemed to press the reset button on any standard expectations of a pop star. She placed equal priority on passion and clear communication — like an instructor speaking to an inquisitive student, or a lover pledging devotion.

“I’ve been told I sound like Nina Simone, Nancy Wilson, Odetta, Barbra Streisand, Dionne Warwick, even Mahalia Jackson,” Ms. Flack told The New York Times in 1970. “If everybody said I sounded like one person, I’d worry. But when they say I sound like them all, I know I’ve got my own style.”

Los Angeles Times, “Roberta Flack, timeless R&B singer-songwriter behind ‘Killing Me Softly With His Song,’ dies at 88“

Grammy Award winner Roberta Flack, whose tranquil ballads and 1970s songs such as “Killing Me Softly With His Song” and “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” established her as a timeless R&B singer and songwriter, died Monday. She was 88.

[…]

A classically trained musician, Flack ushered in an enduring style of rhythm and blues with her early classics that she often described as “scientific soul” — a blend of talent, taste and endless practice. Her recording career included nearly two dozen albums, eight Billboard-charting songs and four Grammy Awards, among numerous nominations. She called herself “just a little country girl” who worked hard at being a musician, without relying on glamour.

“I made it 100% on music,” she said.

Even that was an understatement. The Rev. Jesse Jackson described Flack as “socially relevant and politically unafraid.” The Washington Post said she “embodied the Quiet Storm a full decade before it became a successful radio format,” and NPR credited her with being one of the “prime revisionists of the American songbook.”

“I don’t want to be just the standard kind of commercial artist,” she told The Times in 1973. “The thing that really makes you successful is your dedication to your art.”

I was just a kid during her heyday, but her music was inescapable. I hadn’t thought of her in years until Chris Molanphy’s treatment of her and contemporary “R&B queens” Dionne Warwick, Patti LaBelle, and Chaka Khan on his Hit Parade podcast in March 2022. I highly recommend it.