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Overview, ROBERTA FLACK - Killing Me Softly
An Ashford University Summer Pops Concert (Subscribe Now!)
Friday, July 6, 7:30pm
Saturday, July 7, 7:30pm
Matthew Garbutt, conductor
Roberta Flack, vocals
In 1974, "Killing Me Softly" won the Grammy Award for Record of the Year. But it’s just one of a string of blockbuster hits that has placed Roberta Flack among the most talented artists of our time. From "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" to "Where Is the Love?" to "Feel Like Makin’ Love," Roberta Flack’s style and delivery is distinctly all her own.
PRE-PURCHASE PARKING (LIMITED):
Friday, July 6 - Flack Saturday, July 7 - Flack
Artists, 
“I like to think of myself as a musician who has found some original meaning in songs that maybe everybody else has done,” says the legendary Roberta Flack when describing Let It Be, her extraordinary new CD of Beatles tunes. “I’d like to think that my producers and I found some new directions and new meanings. I think that’s the sign of a good interpreter of music. I didn’t write these wonderful songs, of course; I’m only expressing what I feel about them. And what I feel about them – hopefully – is universal enough that people will say, ‘Yeah.’
The universality that Ms. Flack speaks of can be located in her own long and deep personal history with the songs on this collection. Right from the start of her career, when she was a young woman juggling her career as a schoolteacher with her calling as a performer, Beatles songs played an important part, proving their boundless appeal.
“When I made the transition from the classroom as a schoolteacher and was moonlighting at nightclubs in Washington, D.C.,” she recalls, “I chose songs for both settings from the songs we all heard on the radio. As a teacher, I tried – like the TV show Glee suggests now – to teach my kids by using those songs because I found that they already knew the melodies. It was my responsibility to teach them something about music theory, and I used these songs as a means to do that because they already knew and loved them – ‘Hey Jude,’ ‘Yesterday,’ and so on.”
Artists are forged by their times. Roberta Flack, a child prodigy who won a music scholarship to Howard University at the age of fifteen, came of artistic age and political consciousness just as America was convulsing over its own terms of existence.
In the political sphere, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement, a vital new chapter in the women’s rights movement and the burgeoning gay rights movement, were all simultaneously roiling. On the big screen, glitzy Hollywood musicals were giving way to Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy. TV was slowly being integrated by the likes of Bill Cosby and Diahann Carroll. Soul music – from the grit of Stax to the gloss of Motown – was redefining how the world saw and heard Black Americans, and therefore America. The Beatles were rewriting every rule of pop culture. And suddenly, right there in the midst of it all, with an iconic Afro, a staggering talent and a vision of music as a tool for both joy and enlightenment was Ms. Roberta Flack.
Starting with her classic debut album, 1969’s First Take, she carved out a career filled with massive radio and chart hits (“First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” “Jesse,” “Feel Like Making Love,” and – with the late, great Donny Hathaway – “Where is the Love?,” “You’ve Got a Friend,” “The Closer I Get to You,” “Back Together Again,” and so many more), countless awards (including four Grammys®) and worldwide critical acclaim for her singing and peerless musicianship.
And to prove the steadfastness of Ms. Flack’s trailblazing artistry, we need look no further than the love she and her work are shown by a new generation of innovative artists who celebrate her influence: Lauryn Hill, who famously covered “Killing Me Softly” with her former group, the Fugees, and kick-started her own dazzling solo career; R&B romantic icon Maxwell, with whom Ms. Flack performed a show-stopping version of her classic hit “Where is the Love” on the 2010 Grammy® Awards program; and revered underground hip-hop producer Flying Lotus, who created a fan-favorite track titled “Roberta Flack,” in tribute to the lady herself.
In explaining what moves her to continue making music, Roberta Flack says simply, “I think music is such a powerful means of expressing what the world needs now, and that’s understanding between individuals, between races, between countries. I think music has the potential for being the answer to all those deep questions we ask ourselves as human beings.”
Watch & Listen, Robert Flack performs her monster 1972 hit "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face"in this vintage video clip:
