Why Roberta Flack Was Indefinable as an Artist
Original Airdates: Mar. 7-10, 2025
TVC 681.1: Music journalist A. Scott Galloway (pictured, right) joins Ed as TV Confidential remembers the life and legacy of Grammy Award-winning recording artist Roberta Flack. Scott interviewed Flack in 1988 for her comeback album, Oasis, plus he wrote a very eloquent essay on his Facebook page that captures why the news of her death struck a chord with music lovers around the world, particularly those of us who grew up listening to her songs playing on the radio throughout the 1970s. Roberta Flack passed away Monday, Feb. 24 at the age of eighty-eight. Topics this segment include how Flack was a “full, 360-degree” artist; her tireless activism on behalf of gay rights, women’s rights, people’s rights, and liberty as an American human being; how Clint Eastwood changed the trajectory of Flack’s life and career by integrating “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” in the pivotal love sequence between Eastwood and Donna Mills in Play Misty for Me; and how the success of Oasis was a “buoyant, wonderful surprise.”
Roberta Flack, Charles Fox, and “Killing Me Softly”
Original Airdates: Mar. 7-10, 2025
TVC 681.2: From October 2010: Charles Fox, the Grammy Award-winning and Emmy Award-winning composer who co-wrote “Killing Me Softly with His Song” along with Norman Gimbel, talks to Ed about the phone call he received from Roberta Flack in 1972, asking if she could perform “Killing Me Softly,” and how that call changed Charles’ life. Nearly forty years later, Flack wrote the foreword to Charles’ memoir, Killing Me Softly: My Life in Music (Scarecrow Press, 2010). Roberta Flack passed away Monday, Feb. 24 at the age of eighty-eight.
