Roberta Flack, legendary US songstress who performed for John Paul II, has died

Crux Staff• February 26, 2025

Roberta Flack, the legendary US singer who once performed for Pope John Paul II in New York, died of cardiac arrest on 24 February at the age of 88.

Flack gained worldwide fame as a consummate interpreter of melodies who blended genres from R&B to Soul, Gospel, jazz and various other musical strains of Americana, as well as classical and Latin music.

Her encounter with the papacy of the Catholic Church came on 7 October 1995, when Flack joined Natalie Cole and John Secada in New York’s Central Park for a concert whose attendees were drawn as much by the musical star line up as they were by the attendance of Pope John Paul II, who was visiting the US.

Flack performed “The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face” and joined Cole and Secada for a rendition of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”. The New York Times described the pop luminaries as “the warm-up singers for the Pope”.

Born into a musical family and reared in a musical household in Black Mountain, North Carolina — a small town only a short distance from Montreat, where the celebrated Protestant evangelist, Billy Graham, made his home — Flack was the second of five children and began to play piano at the age of 9 years old.

She moved with her family to Arlington, Virginia, and spent most of her childhood and adolescence in that state, before attending Howard University across the river in the US capital on a music scholarship.

Flack was only fifteen years old when she began her studies at Howard, a renowned historically Black institution, and pursued graduate studies at Howard as well, which were cut short by the sudden death of her father. She became a music and English teacher in local junior high schools and also worked as a private tutor to piano students. She began performing in local clubs on the weekends.

Flack began recording in the second half of the 1960s, but her big break came when Clint Eastwood selected one of her songs for the soundtrack to Play Misty For Me, which was Eastwood’s first directorial credit.

She would go on to sell over 8 million albums in a career that spanned six decades and saw her receive numerous awards including five Grammys and one American Music Award for Favourite Female Artist in 1974 based on her hit “Killing Me Softly with His Song”.

Roberta Flack married Steve Novosel – a bassist who recorded and played with dozens of the 20th century’s greatest jazz musicians – in Virginia in 1966. Her marriage to Novosel, who was white, came before the landmark 1967 US Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia, striking down anti-miscegenation laws in all 50 states. Their union would end in divorce in 1972, as would another marriage some years later.

Flack had been in declining health since suffering a stroke in 2016, and in 2022 revealed she had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gherig’s Disease). In 2023, she published a semi-autobiographical children’s book titled The Green Piano: How Little Me Found Music. Co-authored with Tonya Bolden, the book tells the story of how Flack’s father restored an old piano when she was a child, giving her the chance to hone her skills at home.

Photo: Roberta Flack attends the Black Girls Rock! 2017 event at NJPAC in Newark, New Jersey, USA, 5 August 2017. (Photo by Paras Griffin/Getty Images for BET.)