Noted soul music icon Roberta Flack has transitioned at age 88, leaving behind a legacy of music that defined the human condition and defied time and genre. 

For many kids like me who grew up in the 1970s, Roberta Flack’s voice felt like a secret. Not the kind whispered in the dark, but the kind that stays with you long after the moment has passed — settling into your bones, shaping the way you remember love, loss and longing. She didn’t chase the spotlight, didn’t rely on spectacle. Instead, she let her voice do what only the greatest artists can: slow time, turn a lyric into lived experience and make the quiet parts of life feel just as powerful as the loud ones.

Her music arrived at a moment when soul was reaching for the rafters — big voices, bold deliveries, everything at full tilt. And yet, here was Flack, sitting at a piano, unspooling melodies with the patience of someone who knew that real feeling can’t be rushed. 

One of her first big hits, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” climbed the charts and wrapped itself around the hearts of anyone who had ever been stopped in their tracks by love. “Killing Me Softly with His Song” was more than a hit — it was a testament to the way music itself can reach into you, pull you under and hold you there. This was the gift she gave the world, and today, as we mourn her passing, we also celebrate the way her music continues to hold us still.

A classical foundation, a soulful legacy

Flack’s journey began in Black Mountain, N.C. in 1937, and by 15, she was already breaking barriers. Accepted to Howard University on a full music scholarship, she studied classical piano with dreams of becoming a concert pianist. But the world had different plans. That classical training — years of disciplined study, of learning the emotional weight of every note — infused her approach to soul, jazz and pop. She played the piano not as an accompaniment, but as an extension of her storytelling, crafting songs with the precision of a composer and the depth of a poet.

Her debut album, First Take, introduced a different kind of soul — one rooted in patience, in the tension between sound and silence. When Clint Eastwood used “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” in ‘Play Misty for Me,’ it wasn’t just background music. It was the emotional core, a song that was so subtly nuanced that it commanded your attention. That was Flack’s brilliance — she didn’t need to shout for you to feel her.

The Donny Hathaway connection

No conversation about Flack is complete without Donny Hathaway. Their duets — “Where Is the Love?,” “The Closer I Get to You,” “Back Together Again” — weren’t just collaborations, they were conversations. Two voices, locked in a slow dance, giving us a masterclass in what musical chemistry should sound like.

Hathaway was her creative soulmate, his voice a perfect counterpart to hers — rich, warm, endlessly expressive. But his struggle with mental illness was a weight he couldn’t escape. When he died in 1979, it was more than a personal loss for Flack. It was the loss of a sound, a partnership that felt predestined. She carried on, but you could hear the ache of his absence in the music that followed.

Timeless songs, timeless influence

Flack never followed trends, yet her music never felt dated. She gave us “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” a song so effortlessly sensual it became a blueprint for R&B ballads that followed. She brought elegance to pop with “Tonight, I Celebrate My Love” alongside Peabo Bryson. And with “Killing Me Softly with His Song,” she created an anthem that would resonate across generations, later reimagined by Lauryn Hill and the Fugees — a testament to the enduring weight of her artistry.

Her sound was jazz, was folk, was gospel, was classical. It was everything, all at once, but always unmistakably hers.

A voice silenced, a legacy that endures

In 2022, ALS — amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — took away the instrument that had defined her life. ALS is a ruthless disease, stripping away muscle control, robbing the body of its ability to move, to speak, to sing. It forced Flack into retirement, but it could never take away what she had already given us.

Her music remains. The intimacy she created, the moments she soundtracked, the quiet fire she ignited in every note — those things don’t fade. She showed us that soul isn’t always about volume, that love songs don’t need excess, that true artistry is about knowing exactly when to let the music breathe.

The soundtrack of love and life

There are voices that shake the room, and then there are voices that change the air in the room itself. Roberta Flack was the latter. Her songs were never just heard; they were felt, stitched into the fabric of love stories, heartbreaks, stolen moments and slow dances.

She may be gone, but her voice? Her impact? That lingers, like the final note of a song that refuses to fade. Put on “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” tonight. Let it remind you that some voices never truly leave us.

NEW YORK (AP) — Roberta Flack, the Grammy-winning singer and pianist whose intimate vocal and musical style made her one of the top recordings artists of the 1970s and an influential performer long after, died Monday. She was 88.

She died at home surrounded by her family, publicist Elaine Schock said in a statement. Flack announced in 2022 she had ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, and could no longer sing.

Little known before her early 30s, Flack became an overnight star after Clint Eastwood used “The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face” as the soundtrack for one of cinema’s more memorable and explicit love scenes, between the actor and Donna Mills in his 1971 film “Play Misty for Me.” The hushed, hymn-like ballad, with Flack’s graceful soprano afloat on a bed of soft strings and piano, topped the Billboard pop chart in 1972 and received a Grammy for record of the year.

“The record label wanted to have it re-recorded with a faster tempo, but he said he wanted it exactly as it was,” Flack told The Associated Press in 2018. “With the song as a theme song for his movie, it gained a lot of popularity and then took off.”

In 1973, she matched both achievements with “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” becoming the first artist to win consecutive Grammys for best record.

She was a classically trained pianist discovered in the late 1960s by jazz musician Les McCann, who later wrote that “her voice touched, tapped, trapped, and kicked every emotion I’ve ever known.” Versatile enough to summon the up-tempo gospel passion of Aretha Franklin, Flack often favored a more reflective and measured approach.

For Flack’s many admirers, she was a sophisticated and bold new presence in the music world and in the social and civil rights movements of the time, her friends including the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Angela Davis, whom Flack visited in prison while Davis faced charges — for which she was acquitted — for murder and kidnapping. Flack sang at the funeral of Jackie Robinson, major league baseball’s first Black player, and was among the many guest performers on the feminist children’s entertainment project created by Marlo Thomas, “Free to Be … You and Me.”

Roberta Cleopatra Flack, the daughter of musicians, was born in Black Mountain, North Carolina, and raised in Arlington, Virginia. A gospel fan as a child, she was so talented a piano player that at age 15 she received a full scholarship to Howard, the historically Black university.

Flack’s other hits from the 1970s included the cozy “Feel Like Makin’ Love” and two duets with her close friend and former Howard University classmate Donny Hathaway, “Where Is the Love” and ”The Closer I Get to You” — a partnership that ended in tragedy. In 1979, she and Hathaway were working on an album of duets when he suffered a breakdown during recording and later that night fell to his death from his hotel room in Manhattan.

“We were deeply connected creatively,” Flack told Vibe in 2022, upon the 50th anniversary of the million-selling “Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway” album. “He could play anything, sing anything. Our musical synergy was unlike (anything) I’d had before or since.”

She never matched her first run of success, although she did have a hit in the 1980s with the Peabo Bryson duet “Tonight, I Celebrate My Love” and in the 1990s with the Maxi Priest duet “Set the Night to Music.” In the mid-90s, Flack received new attention after the Fugees recorded a Grammy-winning cover of “Killing Me Softly,” which she eventually performed on stage with the hip-hop group.

Overall, she won five Grammys (three for “Killing Me Softly”), was nominated eight other times and was given a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2020, with John Legend and Ariana Grande among those praising her.

“I love that connection to other artists because we understand music, we live music, it’s our language,” Flack told songwriteruniverse.com in 2020. “Through music we understand what we are thinking and feeling. No matter what challenge life presents, I am at home with my piano, on a stage, with my band, in the studio, listening to music. I can find my way when I hear music.”

In 2022, Beyoncé placed Flack, Franklin and Diana Ross among others in a special pantheon of heroines name-checked in the Grammy-nominated “Queens Remix” of “Break My Soul.”

Flack was briefly married to Stephen Novosel, an interracial relationship that led to tension with each of their families, and earlier had a son, the singer and keyboardist Bernard Wright. For years, she lived in Manhattan’s Dakota apartment building, on the same floor as John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who became a close friend and provided liner notes for a Flack album of Beatles covers, “Let It Be Roberta.” She also devoted extensive time to the Roberta Flack School of Music, based in New York and attended mostly by students between ages 6 to 14.

Flack had taught music in D.C.-area junior high schools for several years in her 20s, while performing after hours in clubs. She sometimes backed other singers, but her own shows at Washington’s renowned Mr. Henry’s attracted such celebrity patrons as Burt Bacharach, Ramsey Lewis and Johnny Mathis. The club’s owner, Henry Yaffe, converted an apartment directly above into a private studio, the Roberta Flack Room.

“I wanted to be successful, a serious all-round musician,” she told The Telegraph in 2015. “I listened to a lot of Aretha, the Drifters, trying to do some of that myself, playing, teaching.”

Flack was signed to Atlantic Records and her debut album, “First Take,” a blend of gospel, soul, flamenco and jazz, came out in 1969. One track was a love song by the English folk artist Ewan MacColl: “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” written in 1957 for his future wife, singer Peggy Seeger. Flack not only knew of the ballad, but used it while working with a glee club during her years as an educator.

“I was teaching at Banneker Junior High in Washington, D.C. It was part of the city where kids weren’t that privileged, but they were privileged enough to have music education. I really wanted them to read music. First, I’d get their attention. (Flack starts singing a Supremes hit) ‘Stop, in the name of love.’ Then I could teach them!” she told the Tampa Bay Times in 2012.

“You have to do all sorts of things when you’re dealing with kids in the inner-city,” she said. “I knew they’d like the part where (‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’) goes ‘The first time ever I kissed your mouth.’ Ooh, ‘Kissed your mouth!’ Once the kids got past the giggles, we were good.”

–Reporting by Hillel Italie, Associated Press