Roberta Flack, legendary songstress who performed for JPII, dead at 88

Feb 25, 2025

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Roberta Flack, legendary songstress who performed for JPII, dead at 88 — Roberta Flack, 1976 (This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published in the United States between 1930 and 1977, inclusive, without a copyright notice.)

Roberta Flack, the legendary singer who once performed for Pope St. John Paul II and 125,000 of his closest friends, died of cardiac arrest on Monday at the age of 88.

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

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 age 9. 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 U.S. 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 (Favorite Female Artist for “Killing Me Softly with His Song” in 1974).

Flack joined Natalie Cole and John Secada in concert at daybreak in New York’s Central Park on October 7, 1995, but most folks in attendance that day were there to see someone else: Pope St. John Paul II. 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.”

Roberta Flack married Steve Novosel — a bassist who recorded and played with dozens of the 20^th century’s greatest jazz musicians — in Virginia in 1966. The landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down anti-miscegenation laws in all 50 states, Loving v. Virginia, would only come in 1967. 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.