A

Roberta Flack, 1937-2025

The 'Killing Me Softly' singer dies at 88 after a battle with ALS.

By Rachel DeSantis in People

oberta Flack, who blended jazz, soul, pop and classical music to create a style all her own, died in Manhattan on Feb. 24, two weeks after her 88th birthday. Three years ago, she revealed she'd been diagnosed with the degenerative disease ALS, which robbed her of her singing voice and made it difficult to speak. In a statement following her death, Flack's representatives remembered her as someone who "broke boundaries and records." Flack, who was raised in a musical family in Virginia, spent nearly a decade as a teacher before releasing her first album in 1969, at age 32. After Clint Eastwood heard her sing "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face," he put it in his 1971 film Play Misty for Me, and the song topped Billboard Hot 100 for six weeks in 1972. The next year Flack hit No. 1 again with "Killing Me Softly With His Song," which made her the first person to win Record of the Year at the Grammys two years in a row. In total, she was given 13 Grammy nods throughout her career, with the last coming in 1995 for Roberta, which was nominated for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Performance. She would continue making music up until the late 2010s, paying homage to The Beatles in 2012 with her covers album Let It Be Roberta. Her final album, Running, was shared in 2018, the year she retired from music after suffering a stroke two years earlier. In 2020 she was honored with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and went on to announce her amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) diagnosis, a neurodegenerative disease that impacts the nerves in the brain and spinal cord, in 2022. Her final years saw her work on projects including a children's book and a documentary about her life. The latter was titled Roberta, and was shared in Nov. 2022, while the children's book, The Little Green Piano: How Little Me Found Music, arrived the following year. An activist and philanthropist, Flack remained a teacher at heart. She established the Roberta Flack Foundation in 2010 to help young people fulfill their dreams through education and mentorship. She is survived by her son Bernard Wright, who is also a musician.  

Garrett Morris Remembers

As 'Saturday Night Live' celebrates its 50th anniversary, original cast member
Garrett Morris shares his struggle to get recognized on the iconic comedy show.

As told to Olivia B. Waxman in Time

 had been in show business for about 17 years before Saturday Night Live came along. I wrote a couple plays, and I did a lot of musicals. SNL was my first television job -- a job paying me more than I had ever been paid before, and I was finally paying my rent.

I'm an introvert, so I would usually just do the show and go back to my apartment. This was a mistake, because what you're supposed to do is go to the bar, hang out with the group, and develop relationships. There were some drugs -- I was a cocaine fiend, but a teetotaler when it came to alcohol.

But back on the set, being the one Black guy, I was just concerned about whether I'd be used at all. It was not an unusual experience to be the one Black person in a cast of mostly white people. I had to fight to get people to write for me. Lorne Michaels came up with the premise of a sketch featuring guys on death row performing as the "Death Row Follies." All he had was a premise. We had to go to our dressing room and come up with something. I remembered this scene from Art Linkletter, a very popular talk-show host in the 1950s, where a white lady from down South sang, "I'm gonna get me a shotgun and shoot all the n-----s I see." I realized if I replaced n----- with whitey, I would have the perfect song for a Black man on death row. So that's how I came up with that sketch.

I also was proud of the fact that I came up with the idea for the "White Guilt Relief Fund" sketch. There was a running joke in the Black community about groups like the Black Panthers, SNCC, CORE, the NAACP, who would regularly go out fundraising. All-Black groups got some money, but groups that had a goodly amount of white liberals got much more. People are still arguing about whether there should be reparations for slavery, and the idea of a "White Guilt Relief Fund" was a way of talking about a very serious economic subject in a comedic way. Whether you were a Democrat or Republican, you got hit by the comedy of SNL. Now, the whole country is sort of sideways, so you have to be very brave to make fun of a lot of what should be made fun of. It doesn't seem quite as courageous as it was then.

There was a lot of energy, and a lot of beautiful people. I was just amazed at the brilliance of the improvisation -- Gilda Radner, John Belushi, Chevy Chase. They were all such talented people, and I was really honored to be a part of that group.  

 Reader's Comments

No comments so far, be the first to comment.