Roberta Flack, an award-winning R&B vocalist, and songwriter who topped the charts in her time, died on Monday (Feb. 24). Roberta Flack earned her first huge break after actor and director Clint Eastwood used one in every of her songs in his movies.
Roberta Flack was born on Feb. 10, 1937, in Black Mountain, N.C., and grew up within the Washington, D.C. suburb of Arlington, Va. As a baby, Flack was impressed by the gospel singers of her native church and took an curiosity in studying the piano as an instrument. Flack’s abilities as a pianist led to her incomes a scholarship to attend Howard College on the age of 15. Upon graduating, the classically educated Flack labored as a pupil educator earlier than returning to North Carolina to show forward of returning to the D.C. space to show at a number of faculties.
In 1968, on the urging of her vocal coach on the time, Flack grew to become an expert singer and he or she grew to become an everyday performer at Mr. Henry’s restaurant, which nonetheless stands at present in Washington’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. Within the Nineteen Seventies, jazz legend Les McCann found Flack singing at a D.C. nightclub resulting in an audition and wrote contained in the liner notes of her 1969 debut album, First Take for Atlantic Information.
Issues took a flip for the higher for Flack when the aforementioned Eastwood used the Grammy Award-winning track “The First Time Ever I Noticed Your Face” from First Take in his 1971 movie, Play Misty For Me, serving to the album soar to the highest of the Billboard charts and cementing Flack’s standing as a star.
Different hits for Flack embody “The place Is The Love” alongside Donny Hathaway, “Really feel Like Making Love,” and maybe Flack’s greatest hit, “Killing Me Softly With His Tune,” one other Grammy winner, which was remixed by The Fugees in 1996 en path to turning into a worldwide smash.
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[h/t: The Guardian]
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Picture: Axelle/Bauer-Griffin / Getty
Roberta Flack, Award-Successful R&B Vocalist, Dies At 88
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