Mark Savage
Music Correspondent
The R&B singer Roberta Flack, best known for the hits The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face and Killing Me Softly With His Song, has died at the age of 88.
“We are heartbroken that the glorious Roberta Flack passed away this morning, February 24, 2025,” said a statement from her representatives.
“She died peacefully surrounded by her family. Roberta broke boundaries and records. She was also a proud educator.”
Flack had previously announced in 2022 that she had motor neurone disease, and could no longer sing.
Born in North Carolina and raised in Arlington, Virginia, the musician started out as a classical pianist. She gained a full school scholarship to Howard University aged just 15. Her classical training led her into teaching, but at night she’d accompany opera singers on piano, singing pop standards during the breaks.
“The whole while I was studying classical music, especially in my younger years, I was also doing a lot of doo-ron-ron, shoo-doo-bee-doo, all of that stuff, with my peers, so I’ve been fortunate enough to be surrounded by music all of my life, the Bach and the Chopin and the Schumann on one hand, and all the rhythm and blues,” she explained.
Her recording career started after she was discovered singing in a jazz club by musician Les McCann, who later wrote that “her voice touched, tapped, trapped, and kicked every emotion I’ve ever known”.
But she didn’t score her first hit until she was in her 30s – when her recording of Ewan MacColl’s The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face was used to soundtrack an explicit love scene in Clint Eastwood’s 1971 film Play Misty For Me.
It was subsequently named song of the year at the Grammys. Flack won the award a second time the following year, for Killing Me Softly With His Song.
After topping the charts again in 1974 with Feel Like Makin’ Love, Flack took a break from performing to concentrate on recording and charitable causes.
She spent much of the 1980s touring and over the course of her career, worked with artists including Donny Hathaway and Miles Davis.
In 1991 she returned to the charts with a duet with Maxi Priest called Set the Night to Music (from the album of the same name).
She also recorded an album of Beatles covers, called Let It Be Roberta, in 2012.
According to the Guardian, Flack once told a journalist: “What I consider myself is a soulful singer, in that I try to sing with all the feeling that I have in my body and my mind.
“A person with true soul is one who can take anybody’s song and transcend all the flaws, the technique and just make you listen.”
Once married, to US jazz musician Stephen Novosel, the star devoted a lot of her time to the Roberta Flack School of Music in New York.
Reverend Jesse Jackson once described her as “socially relevant and politically unafraid”.
In 2020, a year after having a stroke, Flack was awarded a lifetime achievement award from the Grammys.
“It’s a tremendous and overwhelming honour,” she said at the time.
“I’ve tried my entire career to tell stories through my music. This award is a validation to me that my peers heard my thoughts and took in what I have tried to give.”
Flack’s most famous song was introduced to a new generation of music fans when Lauryn Hill’s hip-hop group The Fugees recorded a Grammy-winning cover of Killing Me Softly, which they would eventually perform on-stage alongside her.
It topped the charts around the world in 1996.
