Roberta Flack (born February 10, 1937) is an American singer and pianist who was the first artist to win the Grammy Award for Record of the Year in two consecutive years: "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" won in 1973 and "Killing Me Softly with His Song" won in 1974.
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Roberta Cleopatra Flack was born in Black Mountain, North Carolina. Her father Laron Flack was a self-taught jazz pianist and her mother, Irene Flack, was church pianist. At the age of nine her family moved to Arlington, Virginia. There she began to take piano lessons and broaden her appreciation of musical genres from R&B and jazz to blues and pop. By the age of 13, she was already displaying her range of musical talent when she won second place honours with her performance of a Scarlatti sonata in a state-wide contest for African American students.
In 1952 at the age of 15, she enrolled at Howard University on a music scholarship. She became one of the youngest students to enrol in that institution in the 20th century. Within a year, she was conducting her sorority’s vocal quartet and accompanying pop, jazz, and opera singers. After switching her major from music to music education, Flack graduated in 1958. She continued her studies at Howard, working toward a master’s degree, but the death of her father in 1959 caused her to put school on hold. Flack returned to North Carolina, where she got a job teaching music in public schools. A year later, she found a similar job in Washington, teaching music and English in the District of Columbia’s junior high schools.
Flack began taking voice lessons, concentrating primarily on opera, with Frederick “Wilkie” Wilkerson. At the same time she worked at the posh Tivoli Club in Washington, D.C., where she served as an accompanist to visiting opera singers. Flack’s own professional singing career began in 1967 at Mr. Henry’s, a nightclub on Capitol Hill, where Flack sang blues, folk songs, and pop standards on an old upright piano. In 1968, at a benefit held at the Bohemian Caverns for the Inner City Ghetto Children’s Library Fund, jazz pianist Les McCann heard Flack perform. He was so impressed that he made a demo tape and took it to Atlantic Records. They sent a scout to hear Flack at Mr. Henry’s, and he signed her immediately.
Her first two albums -- 1969's First Take and 1970's Chapter Two -- were well received but produced no hit singles; however, that all changed when a version of Ewan MacColl's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face," from her first LP, was included in the soundtrack of the 1971 film Play Misty for Me. The single zoomed to number one in 1972 and remained there for six weeks, becoming that year's biggest hit. Flack followed it with the first of several duets with Howard classmate Donny Hathaway, "Where Is the Love.""Killing Me Softly with His Song" became Flack's second number one hit (five weeks) in 1973, and after topping the charts again in 1974 with "Feel Like Makin' Love," Flack took a break from performing to concentrate on recording and charitable causes.
She charted several more times over the next few years, as she did with the Top Ten 1977 album Blue Lights in the Basement -- featuring "The Closer I Get to You," a number two ballad with Hathaway. A major blow was struck in 1979 when her duet partner, one of the most creative voices in soul music, committed suicide. Devastated, Flack eventually found another creative partner in Peabo Bryson, with whom she toured in 1980. The two recorded together in 1983, scoring a hit duet with "Tonight, I Celebrate My Love."
Flack spent the remainder of the '80s touring and performing, often with orchestras, and also several times with Miles Davis. She returned to the Top Ten once more in 1991 with "Set the Night to Music," a duet with Maxi Priest that appeared that year on the album of the same name. Her Roberta full-length, featuring interpretations of jazz and popular standards, followed in 1994. In 2005 Flack founded the Roberta Flack School of Music at the Hyde Leadership Charter School in the Bronx, New York, to provide an innovative and inspiring music education program to underprivileged students free of charge.
As she continued into the 21st century, Flack recorded infrequently but released albums like 2012's Let It Be Roberta: Roberta Flack Sings the Beatles, which showed that her poise and balanced singing had aged well. On April 20, 2018, Flack was appearing onstage at the Apollo Theater at a benefit for the Jazz Foundation of America. She became ill, left the stage, and was rushed to the Harlem Hospital Centre. In a statement, her manager announced that Flack had suffered a stroke a few years prior and still was not feeling well, but was "doing fine" and being kept overnight for medical observation.
Flack has released nineteen albums over her career and won four Grammy awards in addition to a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2020. On November 14, 2022, it was announced by a spokesperson that Flack had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (known in the UK as motor neurone disease) and had retired from performing, due to the disease making it "impossible to sing", according to a spokesperson.
(Edited from AllMusic , BlackPast & Wikipedia)