By Cash Michaels
Contributing writer
Her ballads were haunting. Her voice soothing.
And her artistry, legendary.
Songstress Roberta Flack, a native of Black Mountain, NC, died Monday surrounded by family. She suffered a stroke in 2016, then two years later collapsed on a concert stage. That episode forced her to use a wheelchair for the rest of her life.
In 2022, Ms. Flack was diagnosed with ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, which took away her ability to sing.
She was 88.
To a generation, her remarkable songs like ‘Killing Me Softly With His Song” and “The First Time Ever I saw Your Face” represented an era of black music that has rarely been duplicated since her debut in the 1970s. Ms. Flack was a classically trained musician, and during her career, performed on almost two dozen albums, which produced five Grammy Awards – two of which were consecutive honors for Record of the Year.
It wasn’t until 2020 that Ms. Flack received the recording Academy’s Lifetime Achievement Award. That same year she told NPR, “I think everything you do as a Black person in this country represents a struggle for survival.”
She told the N.Y. Times in 1973 that she was 100% musician who was dedicated to her art.
Roberta Flack received a full music scholarship to Howard University at the age of just 15 years-old. Originally, she aspired to become an opera singer, or a concert pianist at Carnegie Hall, a goal that she finally did achieve later in life.
She was once a music teacher. It was 1970 when she was later the sole musical guest on a Bill Cosby TV special. The following year, Ms. Flack released, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” which won her her first Grammy Award, and was used in the Clint Eastwood film, “Play Misty for Me.”
Ms. Flack holds the distinction of singing at the funeral of baseball legend Jackie Robinson, as well as for many philanthropic causes like AIDS research.
Later in the 1970s, Ms. Flack partnered with prolific singer Donny Hathaway for memorable hits like “You’ve Got a Friend,” “The Closer I Get to You” “Where is the Love” and the dance single “Back Together Again.”
Hathaway died after jumping from a hotel window in 1979.
Their partnership yielded two Grammy nominations in 1980.
The musical legacy of Roberta Flack is manifested in superstar singers like Lauryn Hill, India Arie and Alicia Keys.
Roberta Cleopatra Flack was born in Black Mountain on Feb. 10, 1937 to Laron and Irene Flack. Laron played the piano, and Irene was an organist in church. Little Roberta began playing the piano by ear when she was four, later mastering the craft to play Bach, Beethoven and Chopin.
A virtuoso, Ms. Flack attended the only black high school in Arlington, Va.after her family moved there before winning her full scholarship to Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she further studied piano, before changing her major to music education.
Ms. Flack graduated Howard at 19, and began teaching English literature in Farmville, NC. She later moved back to Washington, D.C. to teach, and moonlight during the evenings there performing in nightclubs, in violation of school district policy.
It was during a summer benefit concert in 1968 that she was first discovered by jazz musician Les McCann. He sent a tape of her performance to Atlantic Records, and from that day on, Ms. Flack never looked back.
Roberta Flack has always been fiercely independent, and fiercely protective of her work. She was also very proud to be a Black woman, and a Black female singer with a unique sound.
“I am a person who has managed to last because I have chosen to stay true to my own ideals and principles, and true to my own experience,” she told the Washington Post in 1989. “I am a Black person who sings the way I do. I am not a Black person who sounds anything like Aretha Franklin or anything like Chaka Khan. I know what I am and I don’t want to, and I shouldn’t have to, change in order to be who I am.”
