Roberta Flack, the R&B icon behind a string of hits including ‘Killing Me Softly With His Song’, has died. “We are heartbroken that the glorious Roberta Flack passed away this morning, February 24, 2025,” her spokesperson 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 provided, but the singer had been battling ALS in recent years. She was 88.
Born to a musical family in 1937 in Black Mountain, North Carolina, Roberta Cleopatra Flack started playing the piano at the age of nine. At 15, she entered Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she conducted the student choir. She began graduate studies in music there, but her father’s death forced her to take a job teaching music and English in Farmville, North Carolina. She went back to Washington, D.C., and taught at Banneker, Browne, and Rabaut Junior High Schools, while also performing at nightclubs in the area. She gave up teaching in 1968, when she was offered a residency at Mr Henry’s Restaurant on Capitol Hill.
Soul jazz pianist and singer Les McCann introduced Flack to Atlantic Records, who released her debut album, First Take, in 1969. Flack’s early Atlantic recordings didn’t sell particularly well, but when Clint Eastwood used her version of Ewan MacColl’s ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ in his 1971 film Play Misty For Me, the song became the biggest hit of 1972 and won the Grammy for Record of the Year. Around this time, she began collaborating with fellow soul legend Donny Hathaway, and the pair scored two US Top 5 hits with ‘Where Is the Love’ and ‘The Closer I Get to You’. When Hathaway died by suicide in 1979, Flack and Hathaway were in the midst of recording an album of duets; ‘Back Together Again’, released posthumously in 1980, reached No. 8.
Flack remains the only solo artist to win the Grammy for Record of the Year two years in a row, winning n 1974 for ‘Killing Me Softly With His Song’. Her third and final No. 1 hit, the self-produced ‘Feel Like Makin’ Love’, arrived in 1974. Though the popularity of her musical output waned in the ’80s, she scored a hit with ‘Makin’ Love’, co-written with Burt Bacharach as the theme for the 1982 film of the same name. In 1983, she recorded the end music to the Dirty Harry sequel Sudden Impact at Eastwood’s request.
In 1996, ‘Killing Me Softly With His Song’ was introduced to a new generation of fans when Lauryn Hill’s the Fugees included their cover on the album The Score, and the group performed the song with Flack at the VMAs. Flack’s final album, a collection of Beatles covers called Let It Be Roberta, came out in 2012.
At the age of 81, Flack released her final recording, ‘Running’, which she served as the closing credits song for the documentary 3100: Run and Become. “The music remains my lifeline,” she told Billboard at the time, after suffering a stroke in 2016. “And the lyrics for ‘Running’ speak to where I am now, working to keep going through music.”
