Roberta Flack, the Grammy Award-winning singer best known for “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” has died. She was 88.
“We are heartbroken that the glorious Roberta Flack passed away this morning, February 24, 2025,” Flack’s rep said in a statement to Variety.
“She died peacefully surrounded by her family. Roberta broke boundaries and records. She was also a proud educator,” the statement added.
The Post has reached out to Flack’s rep.
Flack was battling several health challenges in the years leading up to her death. She publicly revealed she had ALS in late 2022.
The progressive disease “has made it impossible to sing and not easy to speak,” Flack’s manager Suzanne Koga said in a release at the time. “But it will take a lot more than ALS to silence this icon.”
The 2022 release also said that the famous singer and pianist “plans to stay active in her musical and creative pursuits” through her eponymous foundation and other avenues.
Flack was best known for hits like “Killing Me Softly With His Song” and “The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face,” the latter of which catapulted her into stardom after Clint Eastwood used it as the soundtrack for a love scene in his 1971 movie “Play Misty for Me.”
For both songs, Flack won back-to-back Grammy Awards for Record of the Year in 1973 and 1974. She was the first artist to accomplish that feat.
Flack’s other famous song is “Feel Like Makin’ Love,”
One of the hassles of being a Black female musician is that people are always backing you into a corner and telling you to sing soul,” she once told TIME. “I’m a serious artist. I feel a kinship with people like Arthur Rubinstein and Glenn Gould. If I can’t play (20th-century orchestral composer Bela) Bartok when I want to play Bartok, then nothing else matters.”
More to come…