Roberta Flack: Legendary Singer dead at 88

We’ve got some sad news this morning, with it revealed that the legendary R&B singer Roberta Flack has passed away at 88 years old. The singer fought a long battle with ALS and has been retired since 2022. Flack had a series of number-one hits on the Billboard Top 40, with “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” and the iconic “Killing Me Softy With His Song.” That last song received new life in the nineties when it was covered by The Fugees. 

Flack was seen as one of the pioneers of the “quiet storm” genre of R&B which dominated radio throughout much of the seventies. Basically, the genre mixed smooth, jazz-flavoured grooves with R&B, and Flack was among it’s most prolific stars. The genre fell out of favor in the mid-eighties, but Flack remained much in demand. In the mid-eighties, she had a big hit with “Tonight, I Celebrate My Love”, which became a staple of adult contemporary radio stations throughout the decade. She also sang the theme song to the classic Clint Eastwood Dirty Harry movie, Sudden Impact. 

In 1999, she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and recorded a well-received The Beatles cover album called “Let It Be, Roberta” in 2012. Notably, her songs are often still used in movies set in the seventies, with “The first Time Ever I Saw Your Face” memorably used in X-Men: Days of Future Past. She also composed the soundtrack for the Richard Pryor classic Bustin Loose, which is remembered as the first film he completed following his near-fatal drug-related incident in the early eighties. In January 2023, the PBS American Masters series profiled her for their season opener.

Certainly, Flack leaves behind a rich legacy of music, and will be well remembered for generations to come!