Roberta Flack, the R&B innovator known for songs like “The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face,” “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” and “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” has died at the age of 88.
“We are heartbroken that the glorious Roberta Flack passed away this morning, February 24, 2025,” the singer’s representative said in a statement. “She died peacefully surrounded by her family. Roberta broke boundaries and records. She was also a proud educator.” A cause of death was not disclosed; however, Flack had been battling ALS since 2022.
Roberta Cleopatra Flack was born on February 10th, 1937 in Black Mountain, North Carolina, and was raised in Arlington, Virginia. Her mother was a church organist, and a young Roberta began singing with churches of different denominations — including the historic Lomax African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church — just to enjoy their music. She started playing piano at age nine, and by her teenage years, she was so good that Howard University awarded her a full music scholarship.
Flack graduated from Howard at 19 and began teaching music in the Washington, DC area. She began singing in clubs on weekends and evenings, accompanying opera singers on piano and singing blues, folk, and pop standards to herself in the back room during intermissions. Under the advisement of her voice teacher, Frederick “Wilkie” Wilkerson, Flack began singing more pop music than classics, and in 1968, she began performing at Mr. Henry’s Restaurant on Capitol Hill.
Flack became the act to see at Mr. Henry’s, with Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, Ramsey Lewis, and others visiting the restaurant to hear her sing. After jazz pianist Les McCann saw her perform, he arranged for Flack to audition for Atlantic Records. Her debut album, First Take, dropped on the label in 1969. Thanks to her classical training, Flack went on to craft a minimalist style that shared almost as much with 1970s easy listening as with contemporary soul.
In 1971, Flack joined Wilson Pickett, Ike & Tina Turner, Santana, The Staple Singers, Les McCann, Eddie Harris, The Voices of East Harlem, and more in the Ghana Independence Day concert memorialized in the Soul to Soul concert film. The next year, she received her first Billboard hit with her cover of “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,” which rose to No. 76 on the Hot 100. Meanwhile, Clint Eastwood selected her song “The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face” to appear in his directorial debut Play Misty for Me, and it became her first No. 1 hit. The track won Record of the Year the 1973 Grammys, and Flack went on to record music for Eastwood’s 1983 film, Sudden Impact.
In 1972, Flack began working with soul legend Donny Hathaway. The two recorded the Grammy-winning single “Where Is the Love” and the gold single “The Closer I Get to You,” among others, and worked together until Hathaway’s death in 1979. With her 1973 album Killing Me Softly, Flack scored her second No. 1 with the title track, which won both Record of the Year and Best Female Pop Performance at the 1974 Grammys. Decades later, the song earned new life when the Fugees recorded a cover for their 1996 debut The Score. Flack’s third and final No. 1, “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” debuted in 1974.
While Flack never again had a No. 1 hit, she released a number of popular songs in the 1980s, including “Making Love” and “Tonight, I Celebrate My Love.” She sang the theme song for the NBC sitcom The Hogan Family and supplied the voice of Michael Jackson’s mother in the music video for “Bad” over 10 years after she joined the artist in singing “When We Grow Up” for the television special Free to Be…You and Me. In 1991, “Set the Night to Music,” her duet with Jamaican artist Maxi Priest, breached the Top 10.
Flack released music into the 21st century. In 2012, she recorded an album of Beatles covers called Let It Be Roberta, and in 2018, she shared her final studio album, Running. That year, the artist was on stage at the Apollo Theater in New York City for a benefit concert when she became ill and left the stage. She was rushed to the hospital, and in a statement, her manager revealed that she had suffered a stroke a few years prior.
In 2020, Flack was honored with the Grammys Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2022, she announced that she had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the spinal cord and brain. At the time, she said the disease made it difficult to speak and impossible to sing, but that she still had a number of projects in the works, including a children’s book, a documentary about her life, and a 50th anniversary reissue of her landmark album Killing Me Softly. The documentary, Roberta, premiered in November 2022 at DOCNYC, while the children’s book The Green Piano: How Little Me Found Music and the Killing Me Softly reissue were slated for 2023.
