Flack introduced in 2022 she had ALS, generally generally known as Lou Gehrig’s illness, and will now not sing.
NEW YORK — Roberta Flack, the Grammy-winning singer and pianist whose intimate vocal and musical type on “Killing Me Softly with His Track,” “The First Time Ever I Noticed Your Face” and different hits made her one of many high recordings artists of the Nineteen Seventies and an influential performer lengthy after, died Monday. She was 88.
She died at residence surrounded by her household, publicist Elaine Schock mentioned in a press release. Flack introduced in 2022 she had ALS, generally generally known as Lou Gehrig’s illness, and will now not sing,
Little recognized earlier than her early 30s, Flack turned an in a single day star after Clint Eastwood used “The First Time I Ever Noticed Your Face” because the soundtrack for one among cinema’s extra memorable and specific love scenes, between the actor and Donna Mills in his 1971 movie “Play Misty for Me.” The hushed, hymn-like ballad, with Flack’s swish soprano afloat on a mattress of soppy strings and piano, topped the Billboard pop chart in 1972 and acquired a Grammy for document of the yr. In 1973, she matched each achievements with “Killing Me Softly,” turning into the primary artist to win consecutive Grammys for greatest document.
She was a classically educated pianist found within the late Sixties by jazz musician Les McCann, who later wrote that “her voice touched, tapped, trapped, and kicked each emotion I’ve ever recognized.” Versatile sufficient to summon the up-tempo gospel ardour of Aretha Franklin, Flack typically favored a extra reflective and measured strategy.
For Flack’s many admirers, she was a classy and daring new presence within the music world and within the social actions of the time, her pals together with the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Angela Davis, whom Flack visited in jail whereas Davis confronted fees — for which she was acquitted — for homicide and kidnapping. Flack sang on the funeral of Jackie Robinson, main league baseball’s first Black participant, and was among the many many visitor performers on the feminist kids’s leisure mission created by Marlo Thomas, “Free to Be … You and Me.”
