The life of a nine-year-old girl whose dream was to become a musician was transformed when her father discovered a piano dumped in a junkyard.
He repaired the instrument back into working condition and then gifted it to his daughter. In a story resembling a fairy tale, the young girl would go on to become one of the world’s most famous musicians over a career lasting six decades.
Roberta Flack, the legendary soul singer, songwriter and pianist, who died on Monday February 24, exactly two weeks after her 88th birthday, belongs to an elite group of powerful soul singers of our time.
Her exquisite voice ranks alongside those of Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross, Gladys Knight, Patti Labelle, Chaka Khan and Dionne Warwick.
Her music was minimalist, her soft vocals were sometimes almost whispery, conveying the emotion of every lyric.
“When you tell the truth, you don’t have to necessarily scream it,” she said in the 2023 documentary Roberta Flack.
Her signature song Killing Me Softly with His Song released in 1973 has remained relevant through the decades, and was introduced to a whole new generation thanks to a hip-hop version by the Fugees in 1996.
While it is the song, originally recorded a year earlier by Lori Lieberman, that she is most famously associated with, Flack’s catalogue contains depth beyond just one enduring hit.
Her music earned critical acclaim and commercial success and her accomplishments speak for themselves: the first artiste to win the coveted Grammy Record of the Year Award in successive years —The First time Ever I Saw your Face in 1973 and Killing Me Softly the following year.
She won a total of four Grammys from 13 nominations and was honoured with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2020. Berklee School of Music, America’s foremost institution of music education, awarded her an honorary doctorate in 2023.
Flack and her Howard University classmate Donny Hathaway made one of the most successful musical pairings in the 1970s with The Close I Get to You, Where Is the Love and the upbeat dance number Back Together Again.
Her album with Peabo Bryson, Born to Love (1983) yielded the timeless ballad Tonight I Celebrate My Love and other gems like I Just Came Here to Dance and You’re Looking Like Love to Me.
At the age of nine, Roberta Cleopatra Flack, inspired by her parents, who were both musicians, was already playing the church piano.
In her 2023 picture-book memoir, The Green Piano: How Little Me Found Music she recounts how her father a pianist, was walking home one day when he spotted an “old, ratty, beat up, weather-worn, faded” upright piano in a junkyard.
The junkyard owner allowed him to take it and when he got home, cleaned it, tuned it and painted it a beautiful grassy green. A surprise gift for young Roberta.
Classical music was her first love, and her ambition was to be a concert pianist playing the works of great composers like Schumann, Bach and Chopin.
By age 13, she played the complete score of Handel’s Messiah for her church choir and two years later, having jumped two grades in high school, Flack received a full scholarship to study music at Howard University.
She was also teaching in public schools by day and performing as a singer and pianist by night (In later years, she founded the Roberta Flack School of Music in 2007 to provide free music training for young learners).
Jazz musician Les McCann heard her signing in a nightclub in Washington DC and arranged for an audition with Atlantic Records. She played 40 songs in three hours for that audition.
A few months later, in 1969, she was in the studio recording her debut album for the label, First Take.
Among the songs on the album was her cover of a folk song written by British singer-songwriter Ewan MacColl, The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.
It became a massive hit when Clint Eastwood used it in the score for his film, Play Misty for Me and topped the US charts in 1972, three years after its release.
Flack’s definitive album, Killing Me Softly with His Song was released in 1973, followed a year later by another classic, Feel Like Makin’ Love.
She remained a prolific recording artist for the rest of the 1970s and 80s. Among her background singers was one Luther Vandross who, In later years, recalled Flack saying that instead of remaining comfortable “singing ooh and aahs” for her, he needed to make “his own record.”
Flack’s last major success was a duet with Maxi Priest, Set the Night to Music, which hit the US Top 10 Singles Chart in 1991. She suffered a stroke in 2016 and in 2022, announced that she could no longer sing or speak due to ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) a neurological disease.
In her note at the end of her children’s book, Roberta Flack advised aspiring musicians to “find your own green piano and practice relentlessly until you find your voice, and a way to put that beautiful music into the world.”
