Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 250 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.
The world of music and music lovers alike went into mourning when the news broke Monday that Roberta Flack had joined the ancestors at 88. Yet this week has also been a time for celebrating the gifts she blessed us with over multiple decades as a performing artist. Though she retired from singing into 2022 due to ALS, Flack’s musical legacy is timeless.
National and international media have reported her passing.
The Guardian posted:
“We are heartbroken that the glorious Roberta Flack passed away this morning, February 24, 2025,” a statement from her spokesperson read. “She died peacefully surrounded by her family. Roberta broke boundaries and records. She was also a proud educator.”
With her graceful presence, genre-crossing versatility and ability to give voice to the full range of love’s highs and lows, Flack is widely considered one of soul and R&B’s greatest ever artists.
Giovanni Russonello wrote for The New York Times:
Roberta Flack, Virtuoso Singer-Pianist Who Ruled the Charts, Dies at 88
With majestic anthems like “Killing Me Softly” and “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” Ms. Flack, a former schoolteacher, became one of the most widely heard artists of the 1970s.
Ms. Flack’s steady, powerful voice could convey tenderness, pride, conviction or longing, but hardly ever despair. Most of her best-known albums included at least a few funk and soul tracks, driven by a slapping backbeat and rich with observational social commentary. But her biggest hits were always something else: slow folk ballads (“The First Time”) or mellifluous anthems (“Killing Me Softly”) or plush love songs (“Feel Like Makin’ Love”).
“Roberta Flack underplays everything with a quietness and gentleness,” the writer and folklorist Julius Lester once observed in a Rolling Stone review. “More than any singer I know, she can take a quiet, slow song (and most of hers are) and infuse it with a brooding intensity that is, at times, almost unbearable.”
Mr. Lester heard in Ms. Flack an “amazing ability to get further inside a song than one thought humanly possible and to bring responses from places inside you that you never knew existed.”
NPR music critic Ann Powers wrote:
Roberta Flack plays the Kennedy Center in 2003.
Remembering Roberta Flack: The Virtuoso
Roberta Flack's career demands a new way of thinking about the word 'genius’
Roberta Flack has always held two souls within her body. From her childhood days onward, she was herself, the daughter of a draftsman and a church choir organist who learned to play music at her mother's knee. This Roberta strove to understand both Chopin and Methodist hymnody and was precocious enough to gain admission to Howard University at 15. She was a shy, awkward, diligent girl with her nose always in a book and fingers tired from practicing piano scales.
Even then, in her deepest being, she was also Rubina Flake, renowned concert artiste, effortlessly dazzling Carnegie Hall crowds with her performances. Rubina helped Roberta endure the indignities faced by gifted black children in the South, as when she'd sing "Carry Me Back To Old Virginny" for contest judges in hotels where she wasn't allowed to stay the night. Her alter ego helped her feel glamorous and capable when others told her she was imperfect. Rubina had no need to respect others' restrictions. She was a diva, surrounded by bouquets of backstage flowers and the approval of an elite who didn't describe her as having "a chipmunk smile and a nut-brown face."
Then there’s the tribute from her beloved alma mater, Howard University—where those of us in the Fine Arts Department, like Donny Hathaway and Debbie Allen, used to go to hear Flack sing at Mr. Henry’s club. (And Donny even ended up recording with her!)
From The Dig:
Howard University Celebrates the Extraordinary Life of Roberta Flack (B.M.E. ’58, D.Mus. ’75)
Howard University is celebrating the life of one of its most profoundly impactful alumna, the legendary songstress, composer, performer, and artistic icon Roberta Flack (B.M.E. ’58, D.Mus. ’75). Over the course of an incredible career, she inspired countless performers through her talent, showmanship, professionalism, and sheer charisma. She also founded the Roberta Flack Foundation in 2010 to promote animal welfare and music education.
Born in Black Mountain, North Carolina, she was raised in Richmond and later Arlington, Va. A classically trained pianist, Flack earned a music scholarship at age 15 to attend Howard University on a full music scholarship, studying voice and piano. While at Howard, she was a member of the School of Music’s Student Council and became a member of Alpha Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta, Sorority, Inc. Even as a student, she was already garnering acclaim by performing on campus, singing in student talent shows, and directing opera. In 1954, The Hilltop wrote about her “easy flowing vocals” as she sang songs like, “Polka Dots and Moonbeams.” She graduated with a bachelor's degree in music education in 1958. Among many return trips, she came back to perform in Homecoming concerts, and in 1975, she would return to campus to receive an honorary doctorate alongside Dorothy Height.
Tributes have also poured in on social media—far too many to post them all here/
I’m grateful we were able to give her her flowers here on Black Music Sunday before she passed, in “Roberta Flack's musical gift to us has spanned more than 5 decades.”
Music reviewer Nancy Pear wrote the Musician Guide biography for Flack, who was born Feb. 10, 1940, in Black Mountain, North Carolina.
Musically gifted as a child, Flack began taking piano lessons at the age of nine, and by thirteen had won second place in a state-wide piano contest for black students. Academically gifted as well, she skipped several grades in school, graduating at the age of fifteen. Entering Howard University on a piano scholarship, Flack eventually switched to music education, which required both vocal and instrumental training. It was then that her beautiful voice was recognized as first-rate classical material, but--self-conscious about her overweight, and eager to arouse in others the pleasure and excitement music stirred in her--Flack continued to pursue a career in education.
Eighteen years old and degree in hand, she took her first teaching post at a segregated school in Farmville, North Carolina, where many of the students were poor and regularly missed school to work in the fields; some of Flack's students were older than she was. Nonetheless, they were anxious to learn all their teacher put before them, and Flack became totally immersed in their lives: directing the school choir, supervising the cheerleaders, creating special classes for the mentally and physically impaired.
For the next six years Flack taught music at three different junior high schools in Washington, D.C. In her spare time she directed church choirs, instructed voice students, and provided piano accompaniment for singers at local clubs; eventually it was she who was doing the singing. Before long she was a favorite pop vocalist at the fashionable clubs in the capital...
In 2023 PBS’ “American Masters” series aired a Flack biopic (click the link to watch); and their website also has an extensive timeline of her beginnings and career.
From the series’ notes about the episode:
New film tells Flack’s story in her own words and includes interviews with Reverend Jesse Jackson, Clint Eastwood, Yoko Ono, Angela Davis, Eugene McDaniels, Joel Dorn, Peabo Bryson and more.
From “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” to “Killing Me Softly” and beyond, Roberta Flack gave voice to a global soundtrack of beauty and pain, love and anguish, hope and struggle. American Masters: Roberta Flack illuminates where reality, memory and imagination mix to present music icon Roberta Flack, a brilliant artist who transformed popular culture, in her own words. With exclusive access to Flack’s archives of film, performances, interviews, home movies, photos, hit songs and unreleased music, the film documents how Flack’s musical virtuosity was inseparable from her lifelong commitment to civil rights.
Here are three clips from the full program:
“Roberta Flack was a child piano prodigy”
“How Roberta Flack created soul music”
“The origin of Flack's hit ’Killing Me Softly With His Song’"
The PBS program is not the only documentary about Flack. The BBC produced one but when I tried to view it, it was restricted in the United States. However, I found a version on the BBC News YouTube channel—with Spanish subtitles.
Here’s an English translation of the headline and video note:
Roberta Flack: the legendary singer who changed the history of soul in the United States
This BBC documentary explores the story of singer Roberta Flack and how a style of soul emerged in the context of the fight for civil rights in the United States.
One of the legendary figures of gospel and soul, Roberta Flack, marked an era with notable recordings such as "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face," "Killing Me Softly" and "Feel Like Makin' Love."
The singer published the album "Killing Me Softly" in 1973. This album includes the best-known song of her musical career: "Killing me softly with his song" which gave her a Grammy for best female vocal performance.
Give it a watch.
One thing is sure. we can trust that Flack’s musical legacy will be carried on far into the future. This is a cover of a cover of “Killing Me Softly.”
From the PBS video note
"The Color Purple" co-stars Cynthia Erivo and Joaquina Kalukango perform the Hip Hop Trio Fugees’ funky rendition of "Killing Me Softly." The global hit steeped in unrequited love is told by two friends, whose friendship can be felt through the screen
Given the current state of affairs, I doubt we’ll be seeing performances like this at the Kennedy Center in the near future.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that in recent day, we lost not only Roberta Flack, but also Jerry Butler, on Feb. 20 at 85, Chris Jasper of the Isley Brothers on Feb. 23 at 75, and Gwen McCrae on Feb. 21 at 81.
There’s some incredible music being played behind those pearly gates!
Please join me in the comments for more great music, and be sure to post your favorites from the beloved artists we lost this week.
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