Music: Roberta Flack passed softly

[TRIBUTE] Singer, songwriter, and musician, Roberta Flack kills me hard

Where is the love? You said was mine all mine til the end of time? Was it just a lie?

I was listening to her duet, “Where is the Love,” with the late Donny Hathaway last week on my walk assuming all was well and good.

“I would totally see her live,” I said to a friend. Whoops. Well.

Everyone? I want to tell you she’s dead.
I wouldn’t have been able to see her live anyhow. She retired from performance in 2022 due to Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS).

I’m crying with hot tears as I write this. And yes, my morbid sense of humor is coming out because that’s what I do to protect myself.

Who’s killing me softly now? Her.

Flack got the last laugh.

Roberta the Sorceress

I am haunted by the lyrics (penned by William Salter and Ralph Mac Donald) because of the way she brought them to life. All her songs penetrate deeply into your heart. Her harmonizing vocals with Donny Hathaway slip under your tongue and render you speechless:

Oh, how I wish, I never met you I guess, it must have been my fate

To fall in love with someone else's love. All I can do is wait

That's all I can do

“I wish I never met you,” is the line Hathaway sings—and don’t you feel it?

Ever fall so hard for someone that you wish you never met them? Yet with radical acceptance—a coping mechanism—the lyrics reconcile with, “I guess it must’ve been my fate.” I wish I never heard Roberta Flack, but did through her work. She could make any song her own the way she could play a piano.

Every time a Roberta Flack song came on the air—before there was streaming—a silence would cast over the room. Her voice and songs could stop time. Her songs still do.

Roberta Cleopatra Flack: A Legacy

Flack was a living legend for her creative output and brilliance. Born February 10th (an Aquarius), 1937 in North Carolina, she was a musical prodigy at 9 for picking up tunes readily. She came from a large musical family which prepared her to work with music personnel extensively, and collaborate well as she did many times with Hathaway later on. She was one of Howard University’s youngest (at age 15) to enroll there.

I write about her music in the first tense, because my darlings, it’s still here. She’s not. It hurts. She will never be able to sing “Killing Me Softly” live.

I write in my journal everyday. I could only write today’s date, and “Roberta Flack passed softly.” A take on “Killing Me Softly With His Song.”

And then I sobbed

Maybe it’s all for the best, because she was a powerful songstress, and I could have had a cardiac arrest. I did what anyone else so sensitive like me would: put the last song I heard of hers on repeat. Sadly, I’m writing to “Where is the Love.”

When singers die

I want to believe there’s a special heaven for musician-vocalists like her. It’s a hard pill to swallow when these beautiful creatures who (but for no fault of their own) connect with our souls and manifest what we long for and crave: love.

Their work lives on, but what an uneven consolation. We want more. We want that one last song from them. Or like David Lynch, we want one last film. We can’t. We can only have what they’ve given us.

So, to get closer, to her I draw her from memory. Ummm, I make her look like a white person with a soft afro, but…

I tap my fingers into my phone—oh. She’s a goner. Someone on Wikipedia has already documented this. The rest of the internet sources still haven’t caught on. I see search results and it appears as if she’s still around.

But soon, soon, we are going to feel this loss.

I’m preparing you.

Meanwhile, Flack and Hathaway are probably doing a duet in heaven. I’m certain they are.

Finally, to answer the question to the song, “Where is the Love,” I regret to inform you that it’s not in the hands of a lover unrequited. The love has always been there…in your heart.

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Track Links—

Where is the Love

Killing Me Softly

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Tribute vs. Obit—

Tribute can be written or spoken and be posted or said anywhere.

Obituary is more formal containing birth & death along with funeral details.

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(Thanks friends for being so subtle for correcting me—I’m modeling that it’s okay to be ignorant about glaringly obvious things, to correct them, and to learn in order to grow an indomitable ego 😅)