1. Roberta Flack became the first artist to win the Grammy Award for Record of the Year in consecutive years.
47 Facts About Roberta Flack
1. 2.
Roberta Flack was one of the defining voices of 1970s popular music and remained active in the industry, later finding success with duets such as "Tonight, I Celebrate My Love" with Peabo Bryson and "Set the Night to Music" with Maxi Priest.
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Roberta Flack's family moved to Richmond, Virginia, before settling in Arlington, Virginia, when she was five years old.
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Roberta Flack grew up in a large musical family and often provided piano accompaniment for the choir of Lomax African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church singing hymns and spirituals.
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Roberta Flack's father acquired a battered old piano for her, which she learned to play sitting on her mother's lap.
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Roberta Flack gravitated towards classical music and during her early teens excelled at classical piano, finishing second in a statewide competition for Black students aged 13 playing a Scarlatti sonata.
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Roberta Flack eventually changed her major from piano to voice and became assistant conductor of the university choir.
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Roberta Flack became a student teacher at a school near Chevy Chase, Maryland.
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Roberta Flack graduated from Howard University at 19 and began graduate studies in music there, but after the sudden death of her father she had to find work to support herself.
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Roberta Flack took a job teaching music and English at a small, segregated high school in Farmville, North Carolina, for which she was paid $2,800 a year.
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Roberta Flack taught private piano lessons out of her home on Euclid Street, NW, in the city.
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Roberta Flack's break came in the summer of 1968 when she performed at a benefit concert in Washington to raise funds for a children's library in the city's ghetto district, and was seen by soul and jazz singer Les McCann, who was signed to Atlantic Records.
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Roberta Flack was captivated by Flack's voice and arranged an audition for her with Atlantic, in which she performed 42 songs from her nightclub repertoire in three hours for producer Joel Dorn.
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The film was digitally reissued on DVD and CD in 2004 but for unknown reasons Roberta Flack refused permission for her image and recording to be included.
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Roberta Flack's cover version of "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" hit No 76 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1972.
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In 1983, Roberta Flack recorded the end music to the Dirty Harry film Sudden Impact, at Eastwood's request.
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In 1972, Roberta Flack began recording regularly with Donny Hathaway, scoring hits such as the Grammy-winning "Where Is the Love" and later "The Closer I Get to You", both of which became million-selling gold singles.
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On her own, Roberta Flack scored her second No 1 hit in 1973, "Killing Me Softly with His Song" written by Charles Fox, Norman Gimbel l, and Lori Lieberman.
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In 1974, Roberta Flack released "Feel Like Makin' Love", which became her third and final No 1 hit to date on the Hot 100 and her eighth million-seller.
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Roberta Flack produced the single and her 1975 album of the same name under the pseudonym Rubina Flake.
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In 1974, Roberta Flack sang the lead on a Sherman Brothers song, "Freedom", which featured prominently at the opening and closing of the movie Huckleberry Finn.
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Flack, devastated, completed the album and it was released in 1980 as "Roberta Flack featuring Donny Hathaway".
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Roberta Flack found a new duetting partner in Peabo Bryson and they released "Live and More" in 1980.
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Roberta Flack had a hit single in 1982 with "Making Love", written by Burt Bacharach, which reached No 13.
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Roberta Flack continued to tour in the 1980s, often backed by a live orchestra.
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In 1987, Roberta Flack supplied the voice of Michael Jackson's mother in the 18-minute short film for "Bad".
27.
In 1991, Roberta Flack found herself again in the US Top 10 with a cover of the Diane Warren-penned song "Set the Night to Music", performed as a duet with British-Jamaican reggae singer Maxi Priest, that peaked at No 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts and No 2 AC.
28.
In 1999, a star with Roberta Flack's name was placed on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
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In February 2012, Flack released Let It Be Roberta, an album of Beatles covers including "Hey Jude" and "Let It Be".
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Roberta Flack knew John Lennon and Yoko Ono, as both parties lived in The Dakota apartment building in New York City and had apartments next door to each other.
31.
Roberta Flack said that she had been asked to do a second album of Beatles covers.
32.
At the age of 80, Flack recorded "Running" for the closing credits song of the 2018 feature documentary 3100: Run and Become with music and lyrics by Michael A Levine.
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Roberta Flack continued to perform into her eighties until she was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and could no longer sing.
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Roberta Flack was a member of the Artist Empowerment Coalition, which advocated for artists to have the right to control their creative properties.
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Roberta Flack was a spokeswoman for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals ; her appearance in commercials for the ASPCA featured "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face".
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Roberta Flack was the aunt of professional ice skater Rory Roberta Flack.
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Roberta Flack was the godmother of musician Bernard Wright, who died in an accident on May 19,2022.
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For 40 years, Flack had an apartment in The Dakota building in New York City that was right next door to the apartment of Yoko Ono and John Lennon; their son, Sean, grew up calling her "Aunt Roberta".
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Roberta Flack counted among her friends the activists Jesse Jackson and Angela Davis, as well as Maya Angelou, who co-wrote the song "And So It Goes" for Flack's 1988 album Oasis.
40.
In 2018, Roberta Flack was appearing onstage at the Apollo Theater at a benefit for the Jazz Foundation of America when she became ill, left the stage and was rushed to the Harlem Hospital Center.
41.
In late 2022, it was announced that Roberta Flack had been diagnosed with ALS and had retired from performing, as the disease was making it "impossible to sing".
42.
Roberta Flack died of cardiac arrest on February 24,2025, on her way to a hospital in New York City.
43.
On May 11,2017, Roberta Flack received an honorary Doctorate degree in the Arts from Long Island University.
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Roberta Flack was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame in 2009.
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In 2021, Roberta Flack was one of the first inductees into the Women Songwriters Hall of Fame.
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On March 12,2022, Roberta Flack was honored with the DAR Women in American History Award and a restored fire callbox in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington DC commemorating her early-career connection to nearby Mr Henry's neighborhood bar.
47.
On May 13,2023, Roberta Flack received an honorary doctorate from Berklee College of Music.