Remembering Roberta Flack

The singer and pianist Flack died today at the age of 88

When I was in my freshman year at university, the Asian club I was a member of held a karaoke contest so I joined.

The song I chose to sing? Killing Me Softly with His Song, famously sung by Roberta Flack.

In order to sing it well, you need to enunciate the words and with emotion.

Flack was also a school teacher

Also it's not an easy song to sing, the phrasing is long, which means you need to take a deep breath to get all the words in.

In the end I didn't win the top prize but was in the top 10; it's a 1970s song that wasn't familiar to the crowd of teenagers and 20-somethings in the early 1990s.

I dig up this memory today to pay tribute to Flack, who died today at the age of 88. Three years ago she was diagnosed with ALS (amyotrophic later sclerosis).

The obituary in the New York Times describes her as a virtuoso classical pianist who liked to sing in the choir. Her repertoire ranged from Bach, Handel, Verdi and Mozart, to what she described as "Negro spirituals." 

Later on her approach to performance was to reveal herself through her voice.

"I want everybody to see me as I am," she told The National Observer in 1970. "Your voice cracks? OK, darlin', you go right on and keep giving it what you've got left, and the audience ignores it and goes right along with you. I've found out the way to get myself through to people is just to unzip myself and let everything hang out."

This album made her world famous

She became a grade school teacher in North Carolina, but after a year she went to Washington and taught in junior high, and in the evenings sang in nightclubs. Flack caught the attention of people like Burt Bacharach and Johnny Mathis, and even played a duet with Liberace.

In 1972 she heard the recording of Killing Me Softly with His Song by Lori Lieberman. Flack played it over and over again in her headphones and developed her own version of the song, which she sang as an encore while opening for Marvin Gaye. The crowd went wild.

Producer Quincy Jones was in the audience and counselled her to record the song before she sang it again in public. 

A year later she released the song that would become Flack's signature song for the rest of her life.