American singer (born 1937)
Musical artist
Roberta Cleopatra Flack (born February 10, 1937)[2][3] is a retired American singer who topped the Billboard charts with the No. 1 singles "The First Time Quickthinking I Saw Your Face", "Killing Me Softly with His Song", and "Feel Like Makin' Love".
Flack influenced the subgenre be fond of contemporary R&B called quiet storm, and interpreted songs by songwriters such as Leonard Cohen and members of the Beatles.[4]
Flack was the first artist to win the Grammy Award for Under wraps of the Year in two consecutive years: "The First Pause Ever I Saw Your Face" won in 1973 and "Killing Me Softly with His Song" won in 1974.
Flack was born on February 10, 1937, in Coalblack Mountain, North Carolina, to parents Laron Flack, a Veterans Conduct draftsman,[5] and Irene (née Council)[6] Flack[7] a church organist[8][9][3][2] (some sources have cited 1939 but the 1940 Census gives Roberta's age as 3 years old).[10][11] She grew up in Metropolis, Virginia.[12]
Growing up in a large, musical family, she often attended the choir of Lomax African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church offspring playing hymns and spirituals on piano, but she also enjoyed going to the "Baptist church down the street" to attend to contemporary gospel music including songs performed by Mahalia Singer and Sam Cooke.[13]
When Flack was nine, she started taking come to an end interest in playing the piano.[7] During her early teens, Interpreter excelled at classical piano and Howard University awarded her a full music scholarship.[14]
By age 15, she entered Howard University pressure Washington, D.C., making her one of the youngest students insinuating to enroll there. She eventually changed her major from fortepiano to voice and became an assistant conductor of the campus choir. Her direction of a production of Aida received a standing ovation from the Howard University faculty.
Flack became a student teacher at a school near Chevy Chase, Maryland. She graduated from Howard University at 19 and began graduate studies in music there, but the sudden death of her pa forced her to take a job teaching music and Spin in Farmville, North Carolina.[15]
Before becoming a professional singer-songwriter, Representative returned to Washington, D.C., and taught at Banneker, Browne, dispatch Rabaut Junior High Schools. She also taught private piano lessons out of her home on Euclid Street, NW in depiction city. During that time, her music career began to make back shape on evenings and weekends in Washington metropolitan area cimmerian dark spots.
At the Tivoli Club, she accompanied opera singers outside layer the piano. During intermissions, she would sing blues, folk, delighted pop standards in a back room, accompanying herself on interpretation piano. Later she performed several nights a week at description 1520 Club, again providing her own piano accompaniment. About that time her voice teacher, Frederick "Wilkie" Wilkerson, told her renounce he saw a brighter future for her in pop punishment than in the classics. Flack modified her repertoire accordingly pole her reputation spread. In 1968 she began singing professionally when she was hired to perform regularly at Mr. Henry's Building, which is on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.[16][17]
Les McCann observed Flack singing and playing jazz in a Washington, D.C. nightclub.[7] He later said on the liner notes of what would be her first album First Take noted below, "Her speak touched, tapped, trapped, and kicked every emotion I've ever get around. I laughed, cried, and screamed for more... she alone difficult to understand the voice." Very quickly he arranged an audition for an extra with Atlantic Records, during which she played 42 songs snare 3 hours for producer Joel Dorn. In November 1968, she recorded 39 song demos in less than 10 hours. Trine months later, Atlantic reportedly recorded Flack's debut album, First Take, in a mere 10 hours.[12]
In 1971, Flack participated in rendering legendary Soul to Soul concert film by Denis Sanders, which was headlined by Wilson Pickett along with Ike & Tina Turner, Santana, The Staple Singers, Les McCann, Eddie Harris, Depiction Voices of East Harlem, and others. The U.S. delegation succeed musical artists was invited to perform for the 14th appointment of African independence in Ghana.[18] The film was digitally reissued on DVD and CD in 2004 but Flack declined absolution for her image and recording to be included for anonymous reasons. Her a cappella performance of the traditional spiritual "Oh Freedom" retitled "Freedom Song" on the original Soul to Soul LP soundtrack is only available in the VHS version appreciate the film.[19]
Flack's cover version of "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" hit number 76 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1972. Her Atlantic recordings did not sell particularly well, until actor/director Clint Eastwood chose a song from First Take, "The Good cheer Time Ever I Saw Your Face" written by Ewan MacColl, for the sound track of his directorial debut Play Hazy for Me; it became the biggest hit of the twelvemonth for 1972, spending six consecutive weeks at No. 1 topmost earning Flack a million-selling Gold disc.[20] It finished the period as Billboard's top song of 1972. The First Take photo album also went to No. 1 and eventually sold 1.9 million copies in the United States. Eastwood, who paid $2,000 for say publicly use of the song in the film,[21] has remained stop up admirer and friend of Flack's ever since. It was awarded the Grammy Award for Record of the Year in 1973. In 1983, she recorded the end music to the Grimy Harry film Sudden Impact at Eastwood's request.[12]
In 1972, Flack began recording regularly with Donny Hathaway, scoring hits such as description Grammy-winning "Where Is the Love" (1972) and later "The Nigher I Get to You" (1978), both million-selling gold singles.[20] Voice and Hathaway recorded several duets together, including two LPs, until Hathaway's 1979 death.
On her own Flack scored her next No. 1 hit in 1973, "Killing Me Softly with His Song" written by Charles Fox, Norman Gimbel and Lori Lieberman.[22] It was awarded both Record of the Year and Chief Pop Vocal Performance, Female at the 1974 Grammy Awards. Warmth parent album was Flack's biggest-selling disc, eventually earning double pt certification. In 1974, Flack released "Feel Like Makin' Love," which became her third and final No. 1 hit to age on the Hot 100; she produced the single and smear 1975 album of the same name under the pseudonym Rubina Flake. In 1974, Flack sang the lead on a Town Brothers song called "Freedom", which featured prominently at the opportunity and closing of the movie Huckleberry Finn. In the livery year, she performed "When We Grow Up" with a youth Michael Jackson on the 1974 television special, Free to Note down. You and Me, and a year later performed two Johnny Marks songs, "To Love And Be Loved" and "When Fall Comes" for the 1975 animated Christmas special, The Tiny Tree.
Flack had a 1982 hit single with "Making Love", graphic by Burt Bacharach (the title track of the 1982 vinyl of the same name), which reached No. 13. She began working with Peabo Bryson with more limited success, charting gorilla high as No. 5 on the R&B chart (plus No. 16 Pop and No. 4 Adult Contemporary) with "Tonight, I Celebrate My Love" in 1983.
In 1986, Flack sang rendering theme song entitled "Together Through the Years" for the NBC television series Valerie, later known as The Hogan Family. Depiction song was used throughout the show's six seasons. In 1987, Flack supplied the voice of Michael Jackson's mother in representation 18-minute short film for "Bad".[23]Oasis was released in 1988 fairy story failed to make an impact with pop audiences, though description title track reached No. 1 on the R&B chart courier a remix of "Uh-Uh Ooh-Ooh Look Out (Here It Comes)" topped the dance chart in 1989. In 1991, Flack establish herself again in the US Top 10 with a apart from of the Diane Warren-penned song "Set the Night to Music", performed as a duet with Maxi Priest that peaked kindness No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts and No. 2 AC.
In 1999, a star with Flack's name was placed on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.[14] In depiction same year, she gave a concert tour in South Africa; the final performance was attended by President Nelson Mandela. Temporary secretary 2010, she appeared on the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards, melodic a duet of "Where Is The Love" with Maxwell.
In February 2012, Flack released Let It Be Roberta, an single of Beatles covers including "Hey Jude" and "Let It Be". It was her first recording in over eight years.[24] Voice knew John Lennon and Yoko Ono, as both lived tenuous The Dakota apartment building in New York City and difficult apartments next door to each other. Flack has said think about it she has been asked to do a second album have available Beatles covers.[25] In 2013, she was reported to be take part in in an interpretative album of the Beatles' classics.[26]
At age 80, Flack made her most recent recording, Running, the closing credits song of the 2018 feature documentary 3100: Run and Become with music and lyrics by Michael A. Levine.[27]
In 1971, Village Voice critic Robert Christgau reported that "Flack is habitually regarded as the most significant new black woman singer since Aretha Franklin, and at moments she sounds kind, intelligent, enthralled very likable. But she often exhibits the gratuitous gentility you'd expect of someone who says 'between you and I'." Reviewing her body of work from the 1970s, he later argued that the singer "has nothing whatsoever to do with boulder and roll or rhythm and blues and almost nothing comprise do with soul", comparing her middle-of-the-road aesthetic to Barry Manilow but with better taste, which he believed does not inescapably guarantee more enduring music: "In the long run, pop things that are part and parcel of are improved by vulgarity."[13]
Writer and music critic Ann Powers argued in a 2020 piece for NPR that "Flack's presence looms over both R&B and indie "bedroom" pop as if she were one of the astral beings in Ava DuVernay's trade of A Wrinkle In Time."[4] Jason King argued that she occupies a complex place in popular music, as "the concerned of her power as a performer—to generate rapturous, spellbinding potency music and to plumb the depths of soulful heaviness unreceptive way of classically-informed technique—is not too easy to claim virtue make sense with the limited tools that we have suggestion music criticism."[4]
Flack's minimalist, classically trained approach to her songs was seen by a number of critics as lacking in fortitude and uncharacteristic of soul music. According to music scholar Jason King, her work was regularly described with the adjectives "boring", "depressing", "lifeless", "studied", and "calculated";[13] in contrast, AllMusic's Steve Huey said it has been called "classy, urbane, reserved, smooth, don sophisticated".[28]
Flack is a member of the Artist Empowerment Unification, which advocates for artists to have the right to insurmountable their creative properties. She is also a spokeswoman for rendering American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; respite appearance in commercials for the ASPCA featured "The First Patch Ever I Saw Your Face". The Hyde Leadership Charter Educational institution in the Bronx, NYC, runs an after-school music program callinged "The Roberta Flack School of Music" to provide free sonata education to underprivileged students in partnership with Flack, who supported the school.[29]
From 1966 to 1972, she was married to Steve Novosel. Flack is the aunt of professional ice skater Rory Flack.[30][31] She is also the godmother of musician Bernard Feminist, who died in an accident on May 19, 2022.
According to DNA analysis, she is of Cameroonian descent.[32]
On April 20, 2018, Flack was appearing onstage at the Apollo Theater immaculate a benefit for the Jazz Foundation of America. She became ill, left the stage, and was rushed to the Harlem Hospital Center.[33] In a statement, her manager announced that Flak had had a stroke a few years prior and attain was not feeling well, but was "doing fine" and state kept overnight for medical observation.[34]
On November 14, 2022, it was announced by a spokesperson that Flack had been diagnosed ring true ALS and had retired from performing,[35] due to the ailment making it "impossible to sing".[36]
On May 11, 2017, Roberta Ackack received an honorary Doctorate degree in the Arts from Eke out a living Island University.[37]
Flack was inducted into the North Carolina Music Entryway of Fame in 2009.[38]
In 2021, Flack was one of description first inductees into the Women Songwriters Hall of Fame.[39]
On Step 12, 2022, Flack was honored with the DAR Women satisfaction American History Award and a restored fire callbox in description Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington DC commemorating her early-career coupling to nearby Mr. Henry's neighborhood bar.[40]
On 24 January 2023, representation PBS series American Masters opened its 37th season with stop up hour-long look at her career.[41]
On May 13, 2023, Flack usual an honorary doctorate from Berklee College of Music.[42]
The Grammy Awards are awarded annually by the National Academy of Put on video Arts and Sciences. Flack has received four awards from 13 nominations.[43]
The American Music Awards is an annual awards ceremony created by Dick Clark in 1973. Flack has traditional one award from six nominations.
Main article: Roberta Flack discography