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..
She died en route to a hospital, according to Suzanne Koga, her manager and friend. The cause was cardiac arrest, she said. Ms. Flack revealed in 2022 that she’d been diagnosed with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, which left her unable to perform.
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.”
Preternaturally gifted and bookish, Ms. Flack entered college at 15 and graduated while still a teenager. But her musical career blossomed slowly; by the time she found the spotlight, she was well into her 30s and had only recently quit teaching junior high school.
At a small Capitol Hill club called Mr. Henry’s, she had spent years developing an eclectic repertoire of about 600 songs and a riveting, unpretentious stage presence. Even when her fame exploded and her beauty shone on the international stage, Ms. Flack never became larger than life or shed the persona of an earnest, wise-beyond-her-years schoolteacher.
A virtuoso classical pianist who often sang from the piano bench, Ms. Flack described her approach as something like disrobing before the audience. “I want everybody to see me as I am,” she told The National Observer in 1970. “Your voice cracks? OK, darlin’, you go right on and keep giving it what you’ve got left, and the audience ignores it and goes right along with you. I’ve found out the way to get myself through to people is just to unzip myself and let everything hang out.”
Ms. Flack belonged to a broad and continuing tradition of singer-pianists — Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, Alicia Keys — whose music is equally rooted in the blues, the Black church and Western classical music, and who have consistently challenged the strictures imposed by commercial genre.
She saw no need to choose between a broad, accessible repertoire and a proud Afrocentrism, steeped in both 1960s radicalism and her own religious upbringing. As the scholar Jason King wrote, “Perhaps no other mainstream musical artist of the 1970s more complexly brought Black nationalism into discourse with European classical aesthetics.”
From her inaugural album’s first track — “Compared to What,” a shot of sharp social commentary written by her longtime collaborator, Eugene McDaniels — Ms. Flack frequently sang songs of social frustration and racial solidarity.
One of her most tender and affecting performances came alongside Donny Hathaway on “Be Real Black for Me,” a song of love and mutual admiration that they had written with Charles Mann. (It was later famously sampled by the rapper Scarface on his 2002 single, “On My Block.”)
In performance, she and Hathaway sometimes recast “Somewhere,” the Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim Broadway hit, as a declaration of Black solidarity and resolution. “Someday, somehow/We’ll find a new way of living/We’ll find a way of forgiving,” they sang, their voices closely entwined. In one rendition caught on film, she pauses halfway through the first verse to inform her audience: “I want you to know, this has absolutely nothing to do with ‘West Side Story.’ I hope I won’t have to explain it to you.”
And from her early days performing at Mr. Henry’s, a gay-friendly cabaret, Ms. Flack was also a staunch advocate of gay rights. She sang “Ballad of the Sad Young Men” on her debut album, and in performance she often introduced it as a story of young gay barflies seeking belonging.
She sang the theme song to “Making Love,” a 1982 film about a man grappling with his sexual identity. “I was so glad when that song charted,” Ms. Flack said in an interview with Hotspots magazine. “People who did not know that the song was about love between two men loved that song. I would talk about it in my shows, and about how love is love. Between a man and a woman, between two men, between two women. Love is universal, like music. I always say, ‘Love is a song.’”
A full obituary will appear shortly.
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