Roberta Flack exposed Killing Me Softly With His Song to the world – songwriter
By Hannah Roberts, PA Entertainment Reporter
US singer Roberta Flack used “her artistry, her talent, her innovation and her heart” to expose the song Killing Me Softly With His Song to the world, the writer of the track has said.
The soul star, who collaborated with musicians including Miles Davis and Donny Hathaway, died at the age of 88 on Monday, surrounded by her family.
Flack’s version of the song, which was composed by Charles Fox and written by Lori Lieberman and Norman Gimbel, earned her two Grammys.
US songwriter Lieberman told the PA news agency that Flack “changed, not just me, but the whole world with with her music”.
The song was included on Lieberman’s first album with Capitol Records, inspired by a poem she had written about seeing Don McLean at a concert, and a song of his called Empty Chairs.
“My version was climbing up the charts, slowly, but climbing up the charts when Roberta Flack was travelling, I believe it was from New York to LA, and on the airplane, in the inflight system, she heard my song,” she said.
“By the time she had landed she had listened to Killing Me Softly about four times and scribbled down all the lyrics and all of the chord changes, and she felt that she could do something with that song. It really resonated with her.
“And when she landed she called her producer, Joel Dorn, and told him that she had a song that she really loved, and in time would really like to record it.
“She was performing at, I think it was the Forum in LA, and she had been kind of practising the song with the band that she was performing with, and at the end of one concert, she had an encore, and she said to her band members, ‘I don’t know what to do’.
“And they said, ‘Well, why don’t you do that song we’ve been working on?’
“So she sang Killing Me Softly, and the audience went crazy. Afterwards, she walked off stage, and Quincy Jones said, ‘Ro, don’t you sing that dang song one more time till you record it’.
“And so she she recorded it and changed it in her very special way.
“At any rate, Roberta really responded to the song and how it related to her, and turned my little song into something that, honestly, no one had at that point heard.”
Hip-hop trio Fugees released a new version of the song in 1996 which topped the UK singles chart.
Lieberman said it was “incredible to see how that song could transform and has changed over the years and still is resonating with so many people”.
“So it was the first time that I saw the power of that song and the accessibility of that song.”
She added: “Without Roberta, they would have never heard that song. So I give all of the credit to her and to the young girl that I was when I was moved by Don McLean’s song Empty Chairs.”