Roberta Flack
Roberta Cleopatra Flack known as Roberta Flack (February 10, 1937 – February 24, 2025) was an American singer and pianist known for her emotive, genre-blending ballads that spanned R&B, jazz, folk, and pop and contributed to the birth of quiet storm. Her commercial success included the Billboard Hot 100 chart-topping singles “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”, “Killing Me Softly with His Song” and “Feel Like Makin’ Love”. She became the first artist to win the Grammy Award for Record of the Year in consecutive years.
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Roberta Flack
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| Background information | |
| Birth name | Roberta Cleopatra Flack |
| Also known as | Rubina Flake |
| Born | February 10, 1937 Black Mountain, North Carolina, U.S. |
| Died | February 24, 2025 (aged 88) New York City, U.S. |
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| Years active | 1968–2022 |
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Steve Novosel
(m. 1966; div. 1972) |
Flack frequently collaborated with Donny Hathaway, with whom she recorded several hit duets, including “Where Is the Love” and “The Closer I Get to You”. As one of the defining voices of 1970s popular music, she remained active in the industry, later finding success with duets such as “Tonight, I Celebrate My Love” with Peabo Bryson (1983) and “Set the Night to Music” with Maxi Priest (1991). Across her decades-long career, she interpreted works by songwriters such as Leonard Cohen and members of the Beatles. In 2020, Flack received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
Early life and education
Roberta Flack was born on February 10, 1937, in Black Mountain, North Carolina, to parents Laron Flack, a U.S. Veterans Administration draftsman, and Irene (née Council) Flack a church organist (some sources have cited 1939 but the 1940 Census gives Roberta’s age as 3 years old). She grew up in Arlington, Virginia.
Growing up in a large, musical family, she often accompanied the choir of Lomax African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church by playing hymns and spirituals on piano, but she also enjoyed going to the “Baptist church down the street” to listen to contemporary gospel music including songs performed by Mahalia Jackson and Sam Cooke.
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When Flack was nine, she took an interest in playing the piano During her early teens, Flack excelled at classical piano and Howard University awarded her a full music scholarship.
By age 15, Flack entered Howard University in Washington, D.C., making her one of the youngest students ever to enroll there. She eventually changed her major from piano to voice and became an assistant conductor of the university choir. Her direction of a production of Aida received a standing ovation from the Howard University faculty.
Flack became a student teacher at a school near Chevy Chase, Maryland. She graduated from Howard University at 19 and began graduate studies in music there, but the sudden death of her father forced her to take a job teaching music and English in Farmville, North Carolina.
Personal life
Roberta Flack was a member of the Artist Empowerment Coalition, which advocates for artists to have the right to control their creative properties. She was also a spokeswoman for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; her appearance in commercials for the ASPCA featured “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”.
The Hyde Leadership Charter School in the Bronx, NYC, ran an after-school music program called “The Roberta Flack School of Music” to provide free music education to underprivileged students in partnership with Flack, who founded the school. Flack was also an advocate for gay rights, stating that “Love is love. Between a man and a woman, between two men, between two women. Love is universal, like music.”
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From 1966 to 1972, she was married to Steve Novosel. Flack was the aunt of professional ice skater Rory Flack. She was also the godmother of musician Bernard Wright, who died in an accident on May 19, 2022. For 40 years, Flack had an apartment in The Dakota building in New York City that was right next door to the apartment of Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon. Lennon referred to her as “Aunt” Roberta.
According to DNA analysis, she was of Cameroonian descent.
Critical reputation
In 1971, The Village Voice critic Robert Christgau reported that “Flack is generally regarded as the most significant new black woman singer since Aretha Franklin, and at moments she sounds kind, intelligent, and very likable. But she often exhibits the gratuitous gentility you’d expect of someone who says ‘between you and I’.” Reviewing her body of work from the 1970s, he later argued that the singer “has nothing whatsoever to do with rock and roll or rhythm and blues and almost nothing to do with soul”, comparing her middle-of-the-road aesthetic to Barry Manilow but with better taste, which he believed does not necessarily guarantee more enduring music: “In the long run, pop lies are improved by vulgarity.”
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Writer and music critic Ann Powers argued in a 2020 piece for NPR that “Flack’s presence looms over both R&B and indie “bedroom” pop as if she were one of the astral beings in Ava DuVernay’s version of A Wrinkle In Time.“ Jason King argued that she occupies a complex place in popular music, as “the nature of her power as a performer—to generate rapturous, spellbinding mood music and to plumb the depths of soulful heaviness by way of classically-informed technique—is not too easy to claim or make sense with the limited tools that we have in music criticism.”
Flack’s minimalist, classically trained approach to her songs was seen by a number of critics as lacking in grit and uncharacteristic of soul music. According to music scholar Jason King, her work was regularly described with the adjectives “boring”, “depressing”, “lifeless”, “studied”, and “calculated”; in contrast, AllMusic’s Steve Huey said it has been called “classy, urbane, reserved, smooth, and sophisticated”.
Accolades
The American Music Awards is an annual awards ceremony created by Dick Clark in 1973. Flack received the award for Best Soul/R&B Female Artist at the inaugural show in 1974.
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On May 11, 2017, Roberta Flack received an honorary Doctorate degree in the Arts from Long Island University. She was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame in 2009. In 2021, Flack was one of the first inductees into the Women Songwriters Hall of Fame.
On March 12, 2022, Flack was honored with the DAR Women in American History Award and a restored fire callbox in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington D.C. commemorating her early-career connection to nearby Mr. Henry’s neighborhood bar.
On January 24, 2023, the PBS series American Masters opened its 37th season with an hour-long look at her career. On May 13, 2023, Flack received an honorary doctorate from Berklee College of Music.
Grammy Awards
The Grammy Awards are awarded annually by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. Flack received four awards from thirteen nominations.
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Career
Early career
Before becoming a professional singer-songwriter, Flack returned to Washington, D.C., and taught at Banneker, Browne, and Rabaut Junior High Schools. She also taught private piano lessons out of her home on Euclid Street, NW, in the city. During that time, her music career began to take shape on evenings and weekends in nightclubs.
At the Tivoli Club, she accompanied opera singers at the piano. During intermissions, she would sing blues, folk, and pop standards in a back room, accompanying herself on the piano. Later she performed several nights a week at the 1520 Club, again providing her own piano accompaniment.
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About this time her voice teacher, Frederick “Wilkie” Wilkerson, told her that he saw a brighter future for her in pop music than in the classics. Flack modified her repertoire accordingly and her reputation spread. In 1968, she began singing professionally when she was hired to perform regularly at Mr. Henry’s Restaurant, located on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.
Later career
In 1999, a star with Flack’s name was placed on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In the same year, she gave a concert tour in South Africa. During her tour of the country, she performed Killing Me Softly for President Nelson Mandela at his home in Johannesburg. In 2010, she appeared on the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards, singing a duet of “Where Is The Love” with Maxwell.
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Flack influenced the subgenre of contemporary R&B called quiet storm, and interpreted songs by songwriters such as Leonard Cohen and members of the Beatles.
In February 2012, Flack released Let It Be Roberta, an album of Beatles covers including “Hey Jude” and “Let It Be”. It was her first recording in over eight years. Flack knew John Lennon and Yoko Ono, as both lived in The Dakota apartment building in New York City and had apartments next door to each other. Flack said that she had been asked to do a second album of Beatles covers. In 2013, she was reported to be involved in an interpretative album of the Beatles’ classics.
At the age of 80, Flack recorded “Running” for the closing credits song of the 2018 feature documentary 3100: Run and Become with music and lyrics by Michael A. Levine.
Illness and death
In 2018, Flack was appearing onstage at the Apollo Theater at a benefit for the Jazz Foundation of America. She became ill, left the stage, and was rushed to the Harlem Hospital Center. In a statement, her manager announced that Flack had a stroke a few years prior and still was not feeling well, but was “doing fine” and being kept overnight for medical observation.
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In late 2022, it was announced by a spokesperson that Flack had been diagnosed with ALS and had retired from performing, due to the disease making it “impossible to sing”.
Flack died on February 24, 2025, at the age of 88. Initial reports stated that she died at home among her family. However, her manager, Suzanne Koga, stated she died from cardiac arrest on her way to the hospital in Manhattan.
