BEATLES MAGAZINE: ROBERTA FLACK DIES AT 88

Monday, 24 February 2025

ROBERTA FLACK DIES AT 88

Sad news: Roberta Flack dies at 88.

Rest in peace #RobertaFlack 2/10/37~2/24/25.

Roberta Cleopatra Flack was an American singer and pianist known for her emotive, genre-blending ballads that spanned R&B, jazz, folk, and pop and contributed to the birth of quiet storm.

Her commercial success included the Billboard Hot 100 chart-topping singles "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face", "Killing Me Softly with His Song" and "Feel Like Makin' Love".

She became the first artist to win the Grammy Award for Record of the Year in consecutive years.

In February 2012, Flack released Let It Be Roberta, an album of Beatles covers including "Hey Jude" and "Let It Be". It was her first recording in over eight years.

Flack knew John Lennon and Yoko Ono, as both lived in The Dakota apartment building in New York City and had apartments next door to each other.

Flack said that she had been asked to do a second album of Beatles covers. In 2013, she was reported to be involved in an interpretative album of the Beatles' classics.

Of The Beatles, Flack said: “I started finding my voice around the time the Beatles started playing and I bought everything they recorded. I learned all of their songs and taught them to my students in junior high school in Washington DC.”

However, following the death of her father, Flack moved to Washington, where she started performing pop, folk and blues covers (including the odd early Beatles single) in local clubs, honing her voice and piano technique.

“What appeals to me about the Beatles is their purity,” Flack continued. “They weren’t waiting for somebody else to come up with the idea, it just came out of them. They were several steps beyond the original. When it came to recording my Beatles covers album in 2012, I had found my own space with their music and was able to interpret their songs in my own way.”

Grammy Awards 1975.

But Flack’s relationship with The Beatles went beyond an appreciation of their music. She was close friends with John Lennon and his partner Yoko Ono. Flack and Lennon ended up meeting each other after they both moved into The Dakota apartment building in 1975 and ended up living across the hall from one another.
Let It Be, Roberta is the perfect tribute to The Beatles originality. Throughout the album, Flack finds something unexplored in each of the songs and carves out a space for herself.

In late 2022, it was announced by a spokesperson that Flack had been diagnosed with ALS and had retired from performing, due to the disease making it "impossible to sing".

Flack died on February 24, 2025, at the age of 88. Initial reports stated that she died at home among her family. However, her manager, Suzanne Koga, stated she died from cardiac arrest on her way to the hospital in Manhattan.

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