Grammy-award winning singer Roberta Flack has died at the age of 88, her publicist has announced.
The American singer was best known for her hit songs Killing Me Softly With His Song and The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face.
One of the top recording artists of the 1970s, she died on Monday surrounded by her family.
In 2022, Flack announced she was suffering from ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, and could no longer sing.
Rising to fame in her early 30s, Flack had become an overnight success after Clint Eastwood chose her song, The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face, as the soundtrack for the explicit love scenes of his 1971 movie Play Misty For Me.
The track topped the US charts in 1972, and Flack was rewarded with a Grammy.
The following year she took the coveted record of the year prize at the Grammys for a second time with Killing Me Softly, becoming the first artist ever to do so.
Discovered in the late 1960s by jazz musician Les McCann, Flack was a classically trained pianist, receiving a full scholarship to study at Howard University at just 15.
McCann later wrote of Flack: “Her voice touched, tapped, trapped, and kicked every emotion I’ve ever known.”
A shining light in the social and civil rights movement of the time, Flack was friends with both Reverend Jesse Jackson and Angela Davis whom Flack visited in prison when Davis faced charges – for which she was acquitted – for murder and kidnapping.
Flack also sang at the funeral of Jackie Robinson, major league baseball’s first black player.
Living on the same floor of the famous Dakota apartment building as John Lennon and Yoko Ono, she also became friends with the Beatle, later releasing an album of Beatles covers.
Born Roberta Cleopatra Flack, to musician parents in Black Mountain, North Carolina, in 1937, she was raised in Arlington, Virginia.
Flack’s other hits from the 1970s included 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.
Sadly, their partnership ended in tragedy, after he fell to his death from his hotel room in Manhattan in 1979, after suffering a breakdown while they were recording an album of duets together.
While Flack never matched her first run of success, she had a follow-up 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, she received a wave of new attention after the Fugees covered Killing Me Softly.
A five-time Grammy winner, Flack received a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2020.
Contemporary stars to praise her include Beyoncé, John Legend and Ariana Grande.
Married once, to jazz musician Stephen Novosel, Flack had one son, the singer and keyboardist Bernard Wright.
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