Grammy Award-Winning Singer-Songwriter Roberta Flack Dies at 88

Though she no longer performed in public, she appeared that same year at the Grammys to accept a Lifetime Achievement Award, telling AARP, “It was breathtaking to be there. And to receive hugs and congratulations from Joni Mitchell and Lizzo in the same 24 hours is something, you know?”  

Born in Asheville, North Carolina, February 10, 1937, to parents Laron Flack, a Veterans Administration draftsman, and Irene Council Flack, a church organist, she lived in the nearby town of Black Mountain as a young child, but moved from North Carolina when she was five. She grew up in Arlington, Virginia, “in the Black section of town, which is called Green Valley, but is really just a postal number in Arlington,” Flack told jazz critic Chris Albertson in the 1970s.

There, she studied classical piano, playing Handel’s Messiah for her church choir at age 13 and performing a Scarlatti sonata for a statewide music contest. She excelled at school and skipped several grades, winning a full musical scholarship to Howard University at 15 and majoring in music education.  She completed undergrad and began graduate studies there, but her father’s sudden death cut short her schooling and she began teaching English in a segregated school in Farmville, North Carolina. 

“When I came back home,” she continued to Albertson, “we were living in Washington.”  On a weekend trip back, she took the teacher’s exam in D.C., hoping to get out of her job in North Carolina: “I just didn’t know what I was doing down there. I was too young and very insecure, and I was teaching students who were much older than I, particularly the fellows.”  She passed the examination and immediately got a teaching assignment in D.C. junior high schools, where she stayed for seven years while playing accompanist gigs, working in a vocal studio and making a name for herself in clubs in the late 1960s, slipping her own compositions, improvisations and classical arrangements into her repertoire of 600 songs.

Roberta Flack performing on "Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell" on Oct. 11, 1975.

Ann Limongello/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images

She eventually began headlining at Capitol Hill’s Mr. Henry’s, and in 1969, largely through the soul-jazz pioneer Les McCann, she landed a contract with Atlantic Records and made her debut album, First Take, featuring “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” a Scottish folk song arranged, as the New York Times said, “as a semiclassical dirge.” Actor-director Clint Eastwood heard it while driving down a Los Angeles freeway and had to stop his car, he told Flack, calling to see about featuring it in his 1971 film, Play Misty for Me, which introduced her to a broader audience and spurred her chart success.  

“He said that he would use it in the only part of the movie where there’s absolute love,” she remembered to AARP.  “I was floored, but I said, ‘I want to do it over again.  It’s too slow.’  He said, ‘No, it’s not.’” 

While some critics found her music too middle-of-the-road and safe, she also ventured into political material by civil rights-inspired songwriters such as Eugene McDaniels. NPR’s Ann Powers argued in 2020 that, “Her inventiveness and panache placed Flack beside Aretha Franklin, Judy Collins, and Joan Baez as prime revisionists of the American songbook at the turn of the 1970s. She made room in the repertoire for the new generation of singer-songwriters emerging from the folk revival … [and] later she would work with McDaniels and others to invent a new style of R&B … which, after too many years of critical underestimation, would reveal itself as a prime element in 21st century pop.”

She continued to work through the years, scoring hits “Tonight I Celebrate My Love” (with Peabo Bryson) in 1983, and “Set the Night to Music” (with Maxi Priest) in 1991. At 80, in 2018, she recorded the song “Running” for the documentary soundtrack 3100: Run and Become. And in 2020, she archived bonus tracks for the 50th anniversary release of First Take. She also hosted a syndicated radio show, “Brunch with Roberta Flack.”

Flack was married seven years to jazz bassist Steve Novosel. They divorced in 1972.

In 2023, Flack was the subject of a PBS American Masters documentary. Earlier that year, she recounted her youth in the children’s book The Green Piano: How Little Me Found Music. The book, like the 2010 establishment of the Roberta Flack Foundation to provide grants for music education and animal welfare, was a long-held goal, she said. So was her fame. ​

“I always dreamed of stardom,” she told interviewer Charlie Rose in 1991. “I always wanted to be center stage. I always wanted to find a light.”