Roberta Flack, Grammy-winning singer of 'Killing Me Softly With His Song,' dies at 88
Photo by Roland Charles
When Roberta Flack was asked the question, “Who Is Roberta Flack?” by SOUL Illustrated in 1971, she replied, “Roberta Flack is a sensitive, loving, fallible, feeling person, I don't know where I'm going in terms of my career, I guess as far as I can go.” Today this legend passed away at the age of 88.
Her unique blend of soul, jazz, and R&B would continue on to be instrumental in shaping the music landscape during the 1960s, 1970s and beyond.
The profound influence of Flack on modern music is undeniable; countless artists across various genres have drawn inspiration from her work. Her most iconic song, "Killing Me Softly with His Song," released in 1973, became a monumental hit and has since been covered and sampled by numerous artists, including the Fugees in 1996, which introduced the song to a whole new generation. Another notable track, "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face," received widespread recognition and has been sampled in various songs, showcasing the ethereal vocal prowess that Flack possessed.
Throughout her illustrious career, multiple Grammy Awards were received by Flack, highlighting the remarkable impact she had on the music world.
Roberta Flack was featured on two covers of SOUL Newspaper along side other artists. An in-depth interview with Flack made it in the coveted SOUL Illustrated magazine, highlighting her thoughts on music, upbringing, influences the state of the world, and love life. The following is a reposting of the original article from 1971. The entire issue is available in our member’s section
Who Is Roberta Flack?
Originally published in SOUL Illustrated, Vol.3 Issue #1 April 1971
Roberta Flack is a singer's singer. What kind of music does she sing and play? She sings every kind of music from protest, morality and blues to Beatles, ballads and bossanova!
A visit with Roberta is like going to the country general store ... there is something for everyone.
But, wait a minute, there are a lot of versatile singers around, what makes Roberta so special is what she does with this diversity of material to make it distinctively her own.
Miss Flack possesses, both as a singer and pianist, a rare quality which carries the listener beyond any kind of barrier as though it never existed and places him at the human level that binds all people together through music.
Her warm, sensitive voice has a rich Black texture. Her smooth graceful style carries her attentive audiences effortlessly from ballads to gospel.
Indeed, one cannot label Roberta as a soul or blues singer. As she puts it, "I want to be a singer, not a 'Black singer.' I am Black. I grew up in a lower-class Black home. I think Black is beautiful but there is so much gorgeous music in the world that has nothing to do with Black."
This Afro-topped entertainer, who during the last year has become a conversation piece in music circles, was known for a while by many as a singer's singer. She has been the public's singer since her Atlantic Album "First Take" began selling, and her recent appearance on a Bill Cosby TV special.
She is perhaps as notable for what she is not, as for what she is. She cannot be classified as a 'jazz singer,' though there is an inescapable strain of the blues in much of her material; nor is she a folk singer, although she attributes some backwoods elements to some of her songs.
She is not a throated singer, although social commentary is one part of her bag. In a single set, she shifts from blues to jazz to rock.
About the only thing she doesn't sing is opera, and she has the training to do that too, if she wants to.
"I've been told I sound like Nina Simone, Nancy Wilson, Odetta, Dionne Warwick, even Mahalia Jackson. If everybody said I sounded like one person, I'd worry; but when they say I sound like them all, I know I've got my own style."
She is one of the few, jazz-pop singers to sing about contemporary life. "I don't want to set the-world on fire. I just want to sing for anybody who is interested in listening."
Since music and performing is her first love, she not only talks about it, but also promotes it as well.
"I have discovered, in recent years, that there is absolutely no difference between the essence of spiritualism and the art form of music or any other art form.
"I am now embarking upon a crusade to get people to see that, if there is a God figure which creates all of these things, then He is, indeed, the Creator of music and art forms as well.
"So, I don't go to church every Sunday anymore, I am still worshipping with my music because any minute I could become paralyzed or get arthritis, or any number of things and not be able to play.
"I think God exists in the piano keyboard and in the people who listen to and perform it. It's too beautiful and too divine.
"I sing the way I feel it. And I've had many people tell me that I sound. like Aretha Franklin or Ella Fitzgerald.
"I've got reviews that I can show you by highly respected music. critics. One such critic called me 'the Black Judy Garland.' Well, he came in on the night I was singing 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow' and I wasn't sounding like Judy Garland, but like Roberta Flack ... they associate that song with her."
"If I do a song where I just play piano and sing I close my eyes, I've had people come up to me and say 'you look just like Nina Simone', I don't take that as derogatory. But it's not flattering for any musician to be told that he or she looks like somebody else or that they sound like somebody else.
"With the exception that when so many people tell you that you look and sound like so many different people, I think that's a pretty good way to tell that you've got your own thing going."
Roberta very quickly brings up the name Les Mc Cann. "It was in 1968. He was at the Bohemian Caverns in Washington. Tony Taylor, who owned the club, told Les about me; and he came to hear me."
"Les made a tape of me and took it to Atlantic; he didn't make any promises. But the next day he came and said that Atlantic wanted to record me. I couldn't talk."
"Then a CBS vice president heard about it — the grapevine, I guess — and RCA, Mercury and Columbia. But Atlantic said they would top any offer, and they did, so I stayed with them."
Atlantic gave her a year's contract and recorded her songs this past winter in their New York studios. A cluster of her most devoted Washington fans sat in on the recording debut, eagerly waiting for the big things this national exposure would do for her.
After the recording session, Roberta says, "At first I had my doubts about it. I thought it wasn't commercial enough. But it was very pleasing just the same.
“I love Les, and that's nothing compared to what he has done for me."
We see Roberta, who sings in English and Spanish, as possessing an uncategorized voice compounded of "soul", jazz, gospel, country and pop. The future looks very bright for this new star. But as far as her goals, Roberta says, "My goal is to be perfect in whatever I am doing. I just want to play something I've done all my life. I don't look at it as a way of making zillions of dollars, nor do I look for worldwide acclaim or acceptance."
"I worship the art, and that's all there is to it." When we asked her about the Bill Cosby TV special she stated, "It was the biggest break of my career." The 30-year-old former school teacher and classical pianist had never had national TV exposure before.
Blacks and whites alike regularly pack the room specially built for her in a Capitol Hill night club. Her first album for Atlantic is selling sensationally, according to the manager of a leading record store there. A month ago, the Washington Arts Commission tendered her "the Establishment's seal of approval" when it came en masse to hear her sing.
This "overnight success" is a far cry from the days when she was pelted with apples as she went to her first teaching practice assignment at Alice Deal Junior High in the District. This was while she was attending Howard University in Washington.
Washington's "Black Star" first started to shine in the 40's, when Roberta was born to in Asheville, North Carolina to the Flacks. She spent her early childhood in Richmond, Virginia. Roberta was five and already in the second grade when her family moved up to Arlington.
The Flack family has musical background. Her mother, now a dietian at Wakefield High School in Arlington, was a church organist. Her father, who died in 1959 was a draftsman and played piano in "a very primitive Art Tatum" style, according to Roberta.
Her younger brother, who lives in Washington, D.C. and works as a switchboard operator, also plays the piano.
When she was four, Roberta was picking out songs by ear on the piano and also learned to play the organ. She competed at age thirteen in a state-wide segregated piano concert. She won second prize. ("I remember it well-we had to stay in a ratty little hotel in Richmond and come over to the white hotel only to play and then go right back.")
When she was fifteen, she received a full scholarship to Howard University. She graduated at eighteen in 1958 with a B.A. in music education.
After six months of graduate study (also at Howard on scholarship) she took a $2800-a-year job teaching English in a segregated Farmville, North Carolina school.
Miss Flack regards that year as a teacher a turning point. "All my life I'd been used to praises for my musical ability," she recalls, "but that didn't mean much down there. I had to work like hell, from 7 in the morning till 7 at night. I crammed so much music down their throats, you wouldn't believe it. I wanted to give them so much. They'd never sung four-part harmony before, or heard of Bach chorales and the kids loved it!"
"They'd come to a rehearsal even after picking tobacco all day, when they couldn't even come to school. I lost forty pounds and almost had a nervous breakdown but we did some beautiful things that year."
The, next six years were spent teaching in the Washington public school system, an array of students ranging from the richest whites to the poorest Blacks. Roberta Flack developed a personal approach to teaching and went against school administration rules by letting her students call her by her first name. Soon Roberta and the school system didn't see eye to eye and she began to feel alienated.
With the help of her piano teacher, Alma Blackman, she took a job as a part-time accompanist for the opera singers at the old Tivoli Restaurant in Georgetown ("I loved it-it was like getting a breath of fresh air and great training. You had to be a good sight reader and I could sight read like a breeze.")
It wasn't until three years later that she began to devote entire summers to playing and singing on her own. It was "no sudden decision, it just sort of happened. I was satisfied and happy with the teaching and to be doing something with my talent in music:"
But, inevitably, she began to think about a singing career and moonlighted regularly as a singer-pianist in clubs all over town. By spring, 1967, she was singing five nights a week at the 1520 Club on K street.
But all the while the school board was unhappy, and something had to give.
During this time, she met Stephen Novosel, a bass player, and began singing on the side. Slowly, she was discovered, first by Tony Taylor, impresario of the club at which Bill Cosby first heard her, and by Henry Yaffe, at whose club (Mr. Henry's Up- stairs) she has performed for the last three years.
"I knew she was good," Taylor admits, "but she needed polishing. She opened up Georgetown (formerly Tivoli, now the second Mr. Henry's) in August 1967 and sang there until I built the Upstairs room here, which was especially for her. We have complete rapport . . . a personal friendship, and no problems. She's got plans for bigger things but she'll have this as her home base."
Taylor believes Miss Flack's teaching background is of great value to her mastery of audience control. "She's got the school teacher thing," he says "It's like she's out there rapping to her kids. It made her very aware of all kinds of people. I don't care how big the audience is, or what the mix is. She has the ability to make it one to one."
This "school teacher thing" is very apparent some nights when she asks the audience to sing along in harmony. The classical influence is also clear in her music. "It's easy for me to get wrapped up in the technical aspects of music. I think it's beautiful when a B flat resolves to an A."
When asked about her marriage and if there were any difficulties being married to white, she replied, "Well, yeah. It has been difficult. We didn't do it to prove anything. We were in love ...went together three or four months."
"We met through some mutual friends. Chagrined, and mortified, his family disowned him. My brother refused to give me away. Why, can't you marry a Brother? he kept asking but he forgot we had a white grandfather," she exclaims!
"Some people draw some very negative conclusions, and it hurts sometimes to be ostracized by both Blacks and whites, even though we can say it's the sickness of other people we have to feel sorry for."
"They call him a honkey, they say, 'they must be on dope' or 'she's taking care of him' — I just can't go into all of the things they say. We don't listen. We love each other and that's what's important." ,
Steve, a bass musician, toured Europe and recorded with the Roland Kirk Trio. He currently is recording and plays in clubs in New York. However, when Roberta and Steve get the time they enjoy their new home and four dogs in Alexandria, Virginia.
But they don't often have the time any more because they are both on the road now. Her West Coast tour included stops at Shelly's Manhole and the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. Roberta is not accompanied by a rhythm section. A drummer named Bernard Sweetney who works intermittedly with Jimmie Smith's group and bassist Dave Williams. These men are accomplished musicians in their own right.
While speaking to a class of all Black music students at California State College in Los Angeles Roberta remarked, "This is beautiful but I haven't made it yet. What I mean is that I don't want to stop now. To 'make it', to me means somewhere over the hill I have a goal. I'm only half way there. I hope I haven't reached that mountain top, because when you reach the top what do you do? You either sit there or slide down. I like to think there is more, I've done a lot, you know? But I want to do a lot more."
"I want to do some acting, some plays, writing, conducting; I just want to explore all my abilities, those I think I have, and those I don't know about that I might have. I'm going to be doing a movie soon, it's a bit part, but it's a start. With my music, I try to reach the people because I feel very strongly related to them."
''I'm trying to express myself. I try to get across whatever the message of the song is.
"Everybody's gravy ain't gravy, I do what I feel, the way I feel it, know what I mean?" We then asked her who is Roberta Flack and where is she going, and she replied, "Roberta Flack is a sensitive, loving, fallible, feeling person, I don't know where I'm going in terms of my career, I guess as far as I can go. I am not thinking where I want to go; I guess (she pauses for a minute) that's strange because most people start out in the business with a goal in mind. All I want to do is sing, and wherever that takes me, is fine with me."
To the Black youth and the state of the world, Roberta has this to say, "We as Blacks have so many personal problems that we don't have any strong view on the state of the world, which is sad, and then again its good because we have for so long been concerned with everybody else's problem and not our own, the beautiful thing to do is become concerned about all of these things, and get some of these problems solved."
"As far as the state of the world is concerned, it is in a mess. As far as this country goes there was a time when this country was the best, and may still be the best place to live but we need to be more sincere in our efforts with others. This country can be called one of the best countries; but not the best, because the best is infinite.
We asked Roberta why she thinks she attracts such a large group of followers in such a short time. "They dig me because I'm in the now generation, I'm part of them." "I'm a strong woman, I sing about personal things, and personal experiences that have happened to me, my sensitivity buds are so high. That's why I stay tired all the time, because. I'm so in tune with the things that are happening around me."
"I reach people through sincerity, I have no gimmicks. I don't have any starlight in my eyes." ◽️
Photo By Roland Charles
Photo By Roland Charles
Photo By Roland Charles