Roberta Flack, 1970s ‘Killing Me Softly’ Superstar, Dies at 88
Roberta Flack, the beloved, Grammy-winning 1970s singer best known for such hits as “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” and “Killing Me Softly” died on Monday (Feb. 24) at 88. At press time a statement from Flack’s spokesperson revealed that she died peacefully, with no official cause of death available.
“We are heartbroken that the glorious Roberta Flack passed away this morning, Feb. 24, 2025,” read the statement. “She died peacefully surrounded by her family. Roberta broke boundaries and records. She was also a proud educator.”
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A classically trained pianist from an early age, Flack received a music scholarship at 15 to attend Howard University and was soon discovered singing at Washington, D.C., nightclub Mr. Henry’s by jazz great Les McCann, which led to her signing with Atlantic Records. She scored her first break in 1971 when Clint Eastwood used her version of the moon-y ballad “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” in his directorial debut, Play Misty for Me.
A master of the “quiet storm” style, Flack’s effortless, soothing vocals soon became a staple of R&B and pop radio, leading to a two-decade run of chart hits.
Flack was born Roberta Cleopatra Flack in Black Mountain, N.C. on Feb. 10, 1937, and raised in Arlington, Va., where her mother, Irene, played organ at the Lomax African Methodist Episcopal Church. She learned to play piano on a funky junkyard instrument her father — a jazz pianist himself — found and restored for her, on which she practiced Handel’s Messiah and Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, as well as Mozart’s Requiem.
After getting her public debut playing piano as an adolescent in the Lomax church, Flack studied piano at Howard, then moved on to a music educator program after being told that the racial barriers at that time for a Black classical concert pianist were too high for her to achieve her dream. Following her father’s death in 1959, Flack returned to North Carolina and took a job teaching music at a public school, later moving back to D.C., where she taught at several middle and high schools for a decade.
Flack released her debut LP, First Take, in 1969. In an introduction to the album penned by McCann, the late musician recalled the first time he saw Flack perform: “What I heard touched me on a level that I have never heard since … When my time on this earth is over, in my heart, I want to carry Roberta’s voice back home so the Angels can hear.”
First Take included her first No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” which also helped the album reach No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart; the song would win the Grammy for record of the year in 1972. She hit No. 1 again in 1973 with “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” from the album Killing Me Softly, with the song winning the 1974 Grammy for record of the year. It was later famously covered by the Fugees in 1996 on the group’s second album, The Score.
Flack’s unprecedented back-to-back Grammy wins for record of the year feat wasn’t achieved again until U2 scored the same two-fer with “Beautiful Day” (2001) and “Walk On” (2002). Flack regularly recorded with fellow soul great Donny Hathaway, scoring duet hits on the Hot 100 with the singer on a covers of “You’ve Got a Friend” (1971, No. 29) and “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'” (1971, No. 71), as well as “Where Is the Love” (1972, No. 5), “The Closer I Get to You” (1978, No. 2) and “You Are My Heaven” (1980, No. 47), among others.
She also partnered with Peabo Bryson, another genre standard-bearer, on two top 10 R&B albums in the 1980s: Live & More and the studio album Born to Love. The latter featured the hit single “Tonight, I Celebrate My Love” (No. 5 R&B, No. 16 Hot 100). And deep-rooted Flack fans will remember her sultry pairing with singer-songwriter-musician Michael Henderson on the latter’s album track “At the Concert,” a favorite on R&B radio stations’ late-night Quiet Storm playlists.
Classical, R&B, soul, jazz, pop, folk, blues … nothing was off limits genre-wise for Flack. She scored a total of 18 Hot 100 hits, and landed four albums in the top 10 on the Billboard 200 album charts, as well as more than two dozen charting hits on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart. Beyond First Take, among the other seminal albums in the Flack catalog are 1970’s Chapter Two, 1971’s Quiet Fire, 1972’s Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway and 1978’s Blue Lights in the Basement.
Flack’s chart prominence began to fade by the mid-1980s, but she kept recording, releasing her most recent album in 2012 with The Beatles cover album Let It Be Roberta. She began to perform live more frequently beginning in 2008, until a stroke in early 2016 ended her performing career. Six years later, a spokesperson for Flack confirmed the singer had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).
Over the ensuing years, however, Flack’s legacy continued to grow with expanded 50th anniversary editions of her first three albums. She also wrote the 2023 children’s book, The Green Piano: How Little Me Found Music, about the piano her father had restored. And just last year, engineer and producer Ebonie Smith created an album of poetry and song, On Imagination. Among the featured tracks was “She Came Home Blameless,” a poem by Maya Angelou. It was read by Flack’s longtime friend Valerie Simpson with a spiritual sung by Flack from her last recording, “Down By the River.”
Over the course of her career, Flack was nominated for 14 Grammys and won three. She was also presented with a lifetime achievement award from the Jazz Foundation of America in 2018. Then in 2020, Flack received the Recording Academy’s lifetime achievement award. At the time, Flack said, “When I met artists and so many others in person and heard from them that they were inspired by my music, I felt understood.”
An activist and philanthropist, Flack remained a teacher at heart. She established the Roberta Flack Foundation in 2010 to help young people fulfill their dreams through education and mentorship.
Check out some of Flack’s most beloved hits below.
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