NC Native, Singer Roberta Flack

By Cash Michaels –

Songstress Roberta Flack, a native of Black Mountain, NC, passed on Monday, February 24, 2025, surrounded by family. She was 88.

She suffered a stroke in 2016, then two years later collapsed on a concert stage. That episode forced her to use a wheelchair for the rest of her life. In 2022, Ms. Flack was diagnosed with ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, which took away her ability to sing.

To a generation, her remarkable songs like “Killing Me Softly with His Song” and “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” represented an era of Black music that has rarely been duplicated since her debut in the 1970s. Ms. Flack was a classically trained musician, and during her career she performed on almost two dozen albums, earning five Grammy Awards—including two consecutive honors for Record of the Year.

It wasn’t until 2020 that Ms. Flack received the recording Academy’s Lifetime Achievement Award. That same year she told NPR, “I think everything you do as a Black person in this country represents a struggle for survival.”

She told the New York Times in 1973 that she was a musician who was 100% dedicated to her art.

Full College Scholarship at 15

Roberta Flack received a full music scholarship to Howard University at the age of 15. Originally, she aspired to become an opera singer, or a concert pianist at Carnegie Hall, a goal she finally achieved later in life.

For a time she worked as a music teacher. Then, in 1970, she was the sole musical guest on a Bill Cosby TV special. The following year, she released the single “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” which won her her first Grammy Award. The song was used in the Clint Eastwood hit film, Play Misty for Me. Later in the 1970s, Ms. Flack partnered with prolific singer Donny Hathaway for memorable hits like “You’ve Got a Friend,” “The Closer I Get to You,” “Where is the Love,” and the dance single “Back Together Again.”

Hathaway died after jumping from a hotel window in 1979. Their partnership yielded two Grammy nominations in 1980.

Ms. Flack was offered the distinction of singing at the funeral of baseball legend Jackie Robinson, and was involved in many philanthropic causes like AIDS research.

The musical legacy of Roberta Flack is manifested in superstar singers like Lauryn Hill, India Arie, and Alicia Keys.

Remembering Roberta Flack

Entertainment Tonight remembers the talented singer.

A Virtuoso from Childhood

Roberta Cleopatra Flack was born in Black Mountain on Feb. 10, 1937, to Laron and Irene Flack. Laron played the piano, and Irene was an organist in church. Little Roberta began playing the piano by ear when she was four, later mastering the instrument to play Bach, Beethoven, and Chopin.

Ms. Flack attended the only Black high school in Arlington, VA, after her family moved there, and then won a scholarship to Howard University in Washington, DC, where she further studied piano before changing her major to music education. She graduated from Howard at 19 and began teaching English literature in Farmville, NC. She later moved back to Washington to teach, where she moonlighted—performing in nightclubs—in violation of school district policy.

It was during a summer benefit concert in 1968 that she was first discovered by jazz musician Les McCann. He sent a tape of her performance to Atlantic Records, and from that day on, Ms. Flack never looked back.

Independent and Determined

Roberta Flack was always fiercely independent, and fiercely protective of her work. She was also very proud to be a Black woman, and a Black female singer with a unique sound.

“I am a person who has managed to last because I have chosen to stay true to my own ideals and principles, and true to my own experience,” she told The Washington Post in 1989. “I am a Black person who sings the way I do. I am not a Black person who sounds anything like Aretha Franklin or anything like Chaka Khan. I know what I am, and I don’t want to, and I shouldn’t have to, change in order to be who I am.”