Roberta Flack, Virtuoso Singer-Pianist Behind ‘Killing Me Softly,’ Dies at 88

“I’ve been told I sound like Nina Simone, Nancy Wilson, Odetta, Barbra Streisand, Dionne Warwick, even Mahalia Jackson,” Ms. Flack told The New York Times in 1970. “If everybody said I sounded like one person, I’d worry. But when they say I sound like them all, I know I’ve got my own style.”

Preternaturally gifted and bookish, Ms. Flack entered college at 15 and graduated while still a teenager. But her musical career blossomed slowly; by the time she found the spotlight, she was well into her 30s and had only recently quit teaching junior high school.

At a small Capitol Hill club called Mr. Henry’s, she had spent years developing an eclectic repertoire of about 600 songs and a riveting, unpretentious stage presence. Even when her fame exploded and her beauty shone on the international stage, Ms. Flack never became larger than life or shed the persona of an earnest, wise-beyond-her-years schoolteacher.

A virtuoso classical pianist who often sang from the piano bench, Ms. Flack described her approach as something like disrobing before the audience. “I want everybody to see me as I am,” she told The National Observer in 1970. “Your voice cracks? OK, darlin’, you go right on and keep giving it what you’ve got left, and the audience ignores it and goes right along with you. I’ve found out the way to get myself through to people is just to unzip myself and let everything hang out.”

Ms. Flack belonged to a broad and continuing tradition of singer-pianists — Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, Alicia Keys — whose music is equally rooted in the blues, the Black church and Western classical music, and who have consistently challenged the strictures imposed by commercial genre.

She saw no need to choose between a broad, accessible repertoire and a proud Afrocentrism, steeped in both 1960s radicalism and her own religious upbringing. As the scholar Jason King wrote, “Perhaps no other mainstream musical artist of the 1970s more complexly brought Black nationalism into discourse with European classical aesthetics.”