Fifty years ago, Killing Me Softly, by Roberta Flack (born 1937), was released. The first title of this album, Killing Me Softly With His Song, will allow its performer to achieve the feat – then unheard of – of receiving two consecutive Grammy Awards for best song of the year, in 1973 (with The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face) and in 1974. It became a classic of soul music, influencing a number of musicians, including the Fugees, who covered it in 1996 and took it to the top of the charts again.
The song was originally a tribute to folk singer Don McLean, whose lyrics were first written and recorded by Lori Lieberman in 1971. Its rearrangement and rendition two years later are as much a trademark as the spiritual and political nature of music, by Roberta Flack, a gifted artist, whose Antonino D’Ambrosio (Let Fury Have the Hour, 2012; We’re Still Here: Johnny Cash’s Bitter Tears Revisited, 2015; Frank Serpico, 2017) relates the astonishing journey.
Promoted to university on a scholarship at the age of 15, this piano prodigy dreams of a concert career. But, in the United States of segregation, she found an escape in teaching and played in bars. Racist laws did not prevent her from marrying a white man, which was then prohibited in her native Virginia (and which almost came up for debate again recently).
In 1968, jazzman Les McCann spotted her. When she recorded her first album, it was titled First Take (1969), because she only needed one take to record the songs. She managed to release three albums before Clint Eastwood insisted on using the now classic The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face in his directorial debut, A Chill in the Night (1971). His career took off.
“She wasn’t afraid politically.”
Critics speak of the incredible musicality of Roberta Flack and her overwhelmingly pure voice. Above all, musicians like Les McCann, Peabo Bryson, Yoko Ono, Sean Lennon and Valerie Simpson are interviewed. Angela Davis and Reverend Jesse Jackson also recall what she brought to the fight for civil rights. “She created space to think. And imagine, says the first. Music was a space of solidarity, which helped generate self-esteem and hope. » The second, protégé of Martin Luther King, remembers: “She was not afraid politically. It made sense at the time. » The film is woven from these numerous testimonies, skillfully staged so that the viewer keeps their ears sharp.
It shows how Roberta Flack, contemporary of Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone and Ray Charles, made her singularity heard – at the intersection of fights against racial, sexist and homophobic discrimination. “When you assert your ability to decide, you are immediately pigeonholed,” explains the singer when she talks about the self-production of her album Feel Like Makin’ Love (1975), which she signed with the name of her alter ego, “ Rubina Flake,” to protect herself. “Most of the time you just become a ‘bitch.’ »
A “bitch” sampled today by dozens of artists, notably hip-hop, such as Puff Daddy, Pusha T, Sniper, Oxmo Puccino, De La Soul or Xzibit, to name just a few.
