The great Roberta Flack has died at 88 – let’s enjoy some of the four-time Grammy winner’s greatest hits

What a voice! What a career.

The great Roberta Flack has died at the age of 88 but her sublime music will live on forever.

Miss Flack was the first artist to win the Grammy Award for Record of the Year in two consecutive years: The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face won in 1973 and Killing Me Softly with His Song won in 1974. She won four competitive Grammys in her career and received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2020.

Her other major hits include Feel Like Makin’ Love, Making Love (theme from 1982 film) and Tonight, I Celebrate My Love with Peobo Bryson. Miss Flack recording regularly with Donny Hathaway and they scored hits such as the Grammy-winning Where Is the Love and later The Closer I Get to You, both million-selling gold singles. They were also Grammy nominated for their 1972 version of You’ve Got a Friend. She also performed the wonderful When We Grow Up with a teenage Michael Jackson on the 1974 television special, Free to Be… You and Me.

The New York Times obit states: From her early days performing at Mr. Henry’s, a gay-friendly cabaret, Ms. Flack was also a staunch advocate of gay rights. She sang “Ballad of the Sad Young Men” on her debut album, and in performance she often introduced it as a story of young gay barflies seeking belonging.

She sang the theme song to “Making Love,” a 1982 film about a man grappling with his sexual identity. “I was so glad when that song charted,” Ms. Flack said in an interview with Hotspots magazine. “People who did not know that the song was about love between two men loved that song. I would talk about it in my shows, and about how love is love. Between a man and a woman, between two men, between two women. Love is universal, like music. I always say, ‘Love is a song.’”