Remembering Roberta Flack: 8 timeless hits to salute an unrivaled talent
Flack, whose intimate vocal and musical style made her one of the top recording artists of the 1970s and an influential performer long after, died Monday. She leaves behind a rich repertoire of music that avoids categorization. Her debut, 'First Take,' wove soul, jazz, flamenco, gospel and folk into one revelatory package, prescient in its form and measured in its approach.
Flack will likely be remembered for her classics — 'The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face' and "Killing Me Softly with His Song' among them. As she should be. But her talents extend well beyond the familiar titles.
Read on and then listen to all of the tracks on our Spotify playlist, here.
1969: 'Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye'
Picking one standout from 'First Take' is a fool's errand, but listeners would be wise to spend time with Flack's cover of the Leonard Cohen classic 'Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye,' a strong case for a reimagination eclipsing the original. Her voice transforms Cohen's lament. It's almost impossible to believe this song, let alone the entire record, was recorded over a period of just 10 hours at Atlantic Studios in New York in February 1969. But it was.
1969: 'Angelitos Negros'
Also from 'First Take" is 'Angelitos Negros," performed entirely in Spanish by Flack. It's a song based on a poem by the Venezuelan writer Andrés Eloy Blanco titled 'Píntame Angelitos Negros," with a title lifted from the 1948 Mexican film of the same name.
The movie navigates interracial relationships when a white couple gives birth to a dark-skinned child. Beyond Flack's soaring vocal performance — delivered atop a robust string section and nylon-string guitars — the song serves as an anthem against racial discrimination and a stunning example of the singer's cross-boundary approach to music making.
1972: 'The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face'
As the well-documented lore suggests, Roberta Flack's mainstream success story begins when her dreamy cover of 'The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face," written by English folk artist Ewan MacColl for his wife Peggy Seeger, was used in a love scene between Clint Eastwood and Donna Mills in his 1971 film 'Play Misty for Me."
It quickly topped the Billboard pop chart in 1972 and received a Grammy for record of the year. But her relationship with the song, and her singular ability to bring it to such great heights, was almost kismet. Before recording the ballad, she had real familiarity with it, having taught it while working with a glee club during her years as an educator.
1973: 'Killing Me Softly with His Song"
It is Flack's best-known hit and one of the great love songs of the 20th Century. Flack first heard Lori Lieberman's 'Killing Me Softly with His Song' while on a plane and immediately fell in love with it. While on tour with Quincy Jones, she covered the song, and the audience feel in love with it, too, as they'd continue to for decades.
Her voice is otherworldly in her recording — pinpointing a kind of neo-soul R&B that would dominate for years to come — and she was recognized for it. Flack became the first artist to win consecutive Grammys for best record with this one.
The song would win again in the '90s, when hip-hop trio the Fugees' would offer their masterful take on Flack's cover and introduce much of the world to singer Lauryn Hill's gift.
1975: 'Feel Like Makin' Love'
A standard for R&B and jazz musicians alike — no doubt due to the grandeur of Flack's version — 'Feel Like Makin' Love' is her third career No. 1. It's a mediative seduction, Flack embodying each lyrical vignette in her delivery. 'Strollin' in the park / Watchin' winter turn to spring,' she opens the song, 'Walkin' in the dark / Seein' lovers do their thing.'
1978: 'The Closer I Get to You'
A soulful collaboration with her close friend Donny Hathaway, 'The Closer I Get to You," is a reflective romance, both big-voiced and bigger-hearted singers lifting each other up. But despite its splendor, the song's legacy is marred in tragedy: In 1979, Flack and Hathaway started work on an album of duets when he suffered a breakdown during recording and fell to his death from his hotel room in Manhattan.
1983: "Tonight, I Celebrate My Love"
The '80s brought soft rock detouring for Flack, another experimentation for the innovative performer. 'Tonight, I Celebrate My Love," a duet with the R&B balladeer Peabo Bryson, is at the intersection of a few genres and simultaneously timeless — a feat for a song anchored in shimmery, synthetized production.
1991: 'Set the Night to Music'
In her later career, Flack continued to meet the current moment. A great example is 'Set the Night to Music,' a glossy pop song with English singer Maxi Priest. It was released on her 1991 album of the same name, which also features a then-contemporary cover of Philadelphia soul group The Stylistics' 1970s R&B hit 'You Make Me Feel Brand New."
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
a day ago
- The Guardian
The song of the summer is … nothing? Why 2025's charts are so stale
A spectre is haunting America – the spectre of Shaboozey. Despite it coming out in April 2024, Shaboozey's huge hit A Bar Song (Tipsy) is still, billions of streams later, at No 5 on this week's Billboard chart. Its country-tinged refrain of 'everybody at the bar gettin' tipsy,' an interpolation from J-Kwon 2004 hit Tipsy, has stuck around well past closing time. It's not the only one. It's joined in this week's Billboard Top 10 (which combines streaming and radio airplay data in the US from a given week) by Teddy Swims's Lose Control, which was released in June 2023; Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga's Die With A Smile, which was released in August 2024; and Luther by Kendrick Lamar and SZA, which came out in November 2024. Chart analysts say that 2025 has produced the fewest new hit songs in US history. The mid-year report from Luminate, the company that produces the data for the Billboard charts, shows that of the top 10 most listened to songs so far this year in the US, only one was released in 2025: Ordinary by Alex Warren. All the others are tracks from 2024 and 2023 – No 1 is Luther. As a result it kind of feels like this year's song of the summer is sort of … nothing. Or just the same as last year's? Despite a slew of recent releases from artists Lorde, Justin Bieber, The Weeknd, Miley Cyrus and Lil Wayne, nothing is really crossing the threshold of hit song. Obviously what makes a summer hit is a somewhat vibes-based determination that is hard to put an exact number on, but in the industry getting close to a billion global streams means you have had an unavoidably massive track - and only Ordinary, along with the two Bad Bunny songs DTMF and Baile Inolvidable that were mostly streamed outside the US, have managed that. Things were very different this time last year, when almost the entire Top 10 was filled with huge new hits: Not Like Us by Kendrick, Espresso by Sabrina Carpenter, Beautiful Things by Benson Boone and the aforementioned Shaboozey – back when it was a new song. All of these reached the billion streams mark, with Chappell Roan and Charli xcx making multiple chart entries later on in the year. Of course there are thousands of smaller and medium-sized artists who are having great years, but why have things become so stale at the very top of the charts? In part it is because the overall volume of new music (defined as the songs released in the last 18 months) being listened to is down slightly year on year, around 3%, but it's more pronounced in genres such as pop and hip-hop, where listeners are turning towards nostalgia and delving into back catalogues. Artists that have produced a lot of hype releases this year like Addison Rae, Lorde and Haim have not produced radio songs that appeal to a mass audience, arguably putting more focus on creating an album and aesthetic that works for committed fans. Even stars such as Lizzo and Justin Bieber, who have topped a billion streams in the past, have made records with less obvious choruses and pop production. Some artists just are trying and missing. Carpenter, one of the most successful artists of last year, could nott quite recreate the magic this summer with Manchild, which was a small hit and did hit No 1 for a week before falling down the charts. Her album slated for release later in the summer might still provide a song with more chart staying power. It has long been the case that the pipes through which new music is discovered have become calcified. Less people listen to Top 40 radio, or watch late-night shows, meaning it's harder for a band to have that one big moment when they break into the mainstream. And while TikTok does help certain songs filter into the consciousness, there's still not a fail-safe mechanism for getting them off the app and into the charts. It does not help that the one song that is unambiguously a breakout mega hit this year, Ordinary by the 24-year-old California singer-songwriter Warren, is a little insipid and forgettable, a song desperately indebted to mid-2010s Hozier and Imagine Dragons. Hardly a feelgood song of the summer. But, as Jaime Marconette, the vice-president of music insights and industry relations at Luminate, says, this drift away from new music is not present in every genre. 'It's true that in some genres, like R&B and hip-hop, people are listening to less new music, whereas with Christian and country in particular, they're actually gaining listeners to new music.' He points to Hard Fought Hallelujah, by Christian singer-songwriter Brandon Lake and country star Jelly Roll, as an example of the way the genres are combining to reach wider audiences. 'Christian is the most current streaming genre right now [with the largest proportion of streams to new tracks]. These are genres where their fans were a little bit later to the streaming game but are now starting to really embrace it.' Marconette also says that this is not unprecedented - there have been other years, particularly during the Covid pandemic, when there were fewer new songs in the charts – after which new music bounced back. 'In the Covid period, there was a lot of dramatic things happening in our world. So, it is interesting that now in a period where there's uncertainty out there, we're seeing it again,' he says. 'Perhaps it's just a coincidence, but we're also starting to notice a jump in people streaming recession pop [music released around 2008 with escapist themes from artists such as Taio Cruz and Nicki Minaj] and it does point to a sort of this communal yearning for things that bring comfort from the past.' It's not all bad news: a couple of pop songs this year are streaming pretty well: Bad Bunny has had a string of huge hits outside of the US. Carpenter, Ty Dolla $ign, Maroon 5 and Drake all have records coming out this summer that might change things. Marconette also pointed to the return of K-pop group BTS and the success of the soundtrack to Netflix's animated movie KPop Demon Hunters as big players for the second half of the year. Of course, there is plenty of superlative new music, filed away in millions of private playlists, that might be someone's personal sound of the summer. The charts have never been guardians of taste or even vibes. But it is much harder for one such song to become a communal and inescapable hit. Whether this year is an anomaly or just another sign of ongoing cultural fragmentation remains to be seen.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- The Guardian
The song of the summer is … nothing? Why 2025's charts are so stale
A spectre is haunting America – the spectre of Shaboozey. Despite it coming out in April 2024, Shaboozey's huge hit A Bar Song (Tipsy) is still, billions of streams later, at No 5 on this week's Billboard chart. Its country-tinged refrain of 'everybody at the bar gettin' tipsy,' an interpolation from J-Kwon 2004 hit Tipsy, has stuck around well past closing time. It's not the only one. It's joined in this week's Billboard Top 10 (which combines streaming and radio airplay data in the US from a given week) by Teddy Swims's Lose Control, which was released in June 2023; Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga's Die With A Smile, which was released in August 2024; and Luther by Kendrick Lamar and SZA, which came out in November 2024. Chart analysts say that 2025 has produced the fewest new hit songs in US history. The mid-year report from Luminate, the company that produces the data for the Billboard charts, shows that of the top 10 most listened to songs so far this year in the US, only one was released in 2025: Ordinary by Alex Warren. All the others are tracks from 2024 and 2023 – No 1 is Luther. As a result it kind of feels like this year's song of the summer is sort of … nothing. Or just the same as last year's? Despite a slew of recent releases from artists Lorde, Justin Bieber, The Weeknd, Miley Cyrus and Lil Wayne, nothing is really crossing the threshold of hit song. Obviously what makes a summer hit is a somewhat vibes-based determination that is hard to put an exact number on, but in the industry getting close to a billion global streams means you have had an unavoidably massive track - and only Ordinary, along with the two Bad Bunny songs DTMF and Baile Inolvidable that were mostly streamed outside the US, have managed that. Things were very different this time last year, when almost the entire Top 10 was filled with huge new hits: Not Like Us by Kendrick, Espresso by Sabrina Carpenter, Beautiful Things by Benson Boone and the aforementioned Shaboozey – back when it was a new song. All of these reached the billion streams mark, with Chappell Roan and Charli xcx making multiple chart entries later on in the year. Of course there are thousands of smaller and medium-sized artists who are having great years, but why have things become so stale at the very top of the charts? In part it is because the overall volume of new music (defined as the songs released in the last 18 months) being listened to is down slightly year on year, around 3%, but it's more pronounced in genres such as pop and hip-hop, where listeners are turning towards nostalgia and delving into back catalogues. Artists that have produced a lot of hype releases this year like Addison Rae, Lorde and Haim have not produced radio songs that appeal to a mass audience, arguably putting more focus on creating an album and aesthetic that works for committed fans. Even stars such as Lizzo and Justin Bieber, who have topped a billion streams in the past, have made records with less obvious choruses and pop production. Some artists just are trying and missing. Carpenter, one of the most successful artists of last year, could nott quite recreate the magic this summer with Manchild, which was a small hit and did hit No 1 for a week before falling down the charts. Her album slated for release later in the summer might still provide a song with more chart staying power. It has long been the case that the pipes through which new music is discovered have become calcified. Less people listen to Top 40 radio, or watch late-night shows, meaning it's harder for a band to have that one big moment when they break into the mainstream. And while TikTok does help certain songs filter into the consciousness, there's still not a fail-safe mechanism for getting them off the app and into the charts. It does not help that the one song that is unambiguously a breakout mega hit this year, Ordinary by the 24-year-old California singer-songwriter Warren, is a little insipid and forgettable, a song desperately indebted to mid-2010s Hozier and Imagine Dragons. Hardly a feelgood song of the summer. But, as Jaime Marconette, the vice-president of music insights and industry relations at Luminate, says, this drift away from new music is not present in every genre. 'It's true that in some genres, like R&B and hip-hop, people are listening to less new music, whereas with Christian and country in particular, they're actually gaining listeners to new music.' He points to Hard Fought Hallelujah, by Christian singer-songwriter Brandon Lake and country star Jelly Roll, as an example of the way the genres are combining to reach wider audiences. 'Christian is the most current streaming genre right now [with the largest proportion of streams to new tracks]. These are genres where their fans were a little bit later to the streaming game but are now starting to really embrace it.' Marconette also says that this is not unprecedented - there have been other years, particularly during the Covid pandemic, when there were fewer new songs in the charts – after which new music bounced back. 'In the Covid period, there was a lot of dramatic things happening in our world. So, it is interesting that now in a period where there's uncertainty out there, we're seeing it again,' he says. 'Perhaps it's just a coincidence, but we're also starting to notice a jump in people streaming recession pop [music released around 2008 with escapist themes from artists such as Taio Cruz and Nicki Minaj] and it does point to a sort of this communal yearning for things that bring comfort from the past.' It's not all bad news: a couple of pop songs this year are streaming pretty well: Bad Bunny has had a string of huge hits outside of the US. Carpenter, Ty Dolla $ign, Maroon 5 and Drake all have records coming out this summer that might change things. Marconette also pointed to the return of K-pop group BTS and the success of the soundtrack to Netflix's animated movie KPop Demon Hunters as big players for the second half of the year. Of course, there is plenty of superlative new music, filed away in millions of private playlists, that might be someone's personal sound of the summer. The charts have never been guardians of taste or even vibes. But it is much harder for one such song to become a communal and inescapable hit. Whether this year is an anomaly or just another sign of ongoing cultural fragmentation remains to be seen.
Reuters
2 days ago
- Reuters
Connie Francis, US 'Stupid Cupid' pop singer, dies at 87
July 17 (Reuters) - Connie Francis, the American pop singer who topped the charts in the 1950s and 1960s with genre-spanning songs of youthful love and heartbreak, died on Wednesday night, her manager said. She was 87. Francis had been hospitalized earlier in July with severe pelvic pain, spending some time in intensive care, manager Ron Roberts said. He did not give the place or cause of death. With a powerful, clear voice that could be both peppy and plaintive, Francis sold tens of millions of records in the late 1950s and early 1960s, including the skittering lovesick hit "Stupid Cupid" and the lush, maudlin songs "Who's Sorry Now" and "Where the Boys Are." In 1960, when she was 21, she became the first woman to hold the No. 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart with the release of "Everybody's Somebody's Fool." She went on to record the song in German – "Die Liebe ist ein seltsames Spiel" – and became a keen polyglot in the studio, releasing covers of her hits in Italian, Spanish and several other languages. Francis was born on Dec. 12, 1937, in Newark, New Jersey, to Italian-American parents who named her Concetta Franconero. A talent scout in the 1950s urged her to change her stage name to something radio DJs might find simpler to pronounce. In her memoir, she describes her father, who scraped a living as a laborer in the shipyards and factories of New York, as the most powerful force throughout her life, helping her learn to play the accordion as a child. "I played the accordion the way I did everything else in life – with a vengeance!" she wrote. "Music became my sole focus in life." It was at his urging, Francis wrote, that she recorded what would become her first hit: "Who's Sorry Now" It was at her father's insistence that she stopped dating the singer Bobby Darin in the 1950s. She described not eloping with Darin as one of her life's greatest regrets. Earlier this year, her 1962 recording "Pretty Little Baby" became a viral sensation on the social media app TikTok, with users lip-syncing to it in videos seen by millions. She told People magazine she had forgotten she ever recorded the song. "To think that a song I recorded 63 years ago is touching the hearts of millions of people is truly awesome," she said. (This story has been refiled to remove the extraneous question mark in the song title 'Who's Sorry Now', in paragraphs 3 and 8)
