Robert Flack, the revered singer behind soul classics including “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” died this morning (February 24), her publicists said in an email. No cause of death was given, but Flack had been living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the neurological condition also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease. She was 88 years old.
Roberta Cleopatra Flack was born in 1937 to musician parents in Black Mountain, North Carolina. After the family moved to Arlington, Virginia, she sang in church and eventually became a piano prodigy. She was granted a scholarship for Howard University at the age of 15, making her one of the youngest students to attend the college. She was an assistant conductor of the university choir and directed a production of the Verdi opera Aida. “For the first three decades of my life,” she told NPR’s Ann Powers in 2020, “I lived in the world of classical music. I found in it wonderful melodies and harmonies that were the vehicles through which I could express myself.”
After college, Flack accompanied opera singers in Washington, D.C., by night, and took day jobs teaching in public schools to earn money for her family following the death of her father. But she was persuaded to perform pop music in a residency at the Washington, D.C., club Mr. Henry’s Restaurant, where she became a local sensation. Shortly thereafter, she received a recording contract from Atlantic.
From her 1969 debut, the single-take LP First Take, through her many landmark albums of folk covers, Broadways songs, civil rights protest anthems, and original music in the ensuing years, Flack used her diverse musical expertise to develop a deceptively light, spare style that paired classical technique with the emotional force of gospel; in a 1977 interview cited by the essayist Jason King, Flack said, of her classical training, that she likes to “stay involved in the structure of music” in both a “scientific and soulful way.”
Having begun her recording career at the age of 32, she brought her wisdom to a prolific series of classics in those early years. She blueprinted a trademark sound that drew admirers of soul, jazz, and easy listening while remaining attuned to the volatile currents of the civil rights movement; as she put it in a 2023 documentary, “I protested as a singer with a lot of love.” She was also a pop phenomenon. Her hits “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” and “Feel Like Makin’ Love” came out in successive years starting in 1972, the first two earning back-to-back Record of the Year Grammy Awards. She remains the only artist to have scored the feat.
Flack’s influence is incalculable: She mentored singers who went on to change music history themselves, including Donny Hathaway, Luther Vandross, and Gwen Guthrie; major hits by the likes of Kanye West and, of course, Fugees have incorporated Flack’s work, introducing her to new generations. She founded the Roberta Flack School of Music in the Bronx in 2006, and continued to work as a dedicated humanitarian throughout her life. She released her last album, the Beatles tribute project Let it Be Roberta, in 2012, and received a Lifetime Achievement Grammy in 2020.
Flack’s ALS diagnosis was revealed in 2022, four years after she was hospitalized following a stroke while she performed at the Apollo Theater. Her manager, Suzanne Koga, said at the time that the condition had “made it impossible [for Flack] to sing and not easy [for her] to speak, but it will take a lot more than ALS to silence this icon.”