Roberta Flack died in her home today, amongst family, at the age of 88.
Her fifteenth and final full-length album was Let It Be: Roberta, an album of Beatles covers released in 2012. The album peaked at No. 30 on both the Billboard Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums and Top Independent Albums charts.
The following year she made a cameo in the video for Yoko Ono’s song “Bad Dancer”.
Flack moved into the New York City Dakota Apartment building in the mid-seventies, into a unit that purportedly once belonged to Judy Garland. She shared a wall with John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
In a recent documentary on her life their son Sean, now 49, said "I was very blessed that I grew up with the coolest neighbour in the world. At first, I didn't even think of Roberta as this incredible artist and musician, she was just this really cool neighbour. We used to call her Aunt Roberta, and we were very close."
Flack covered Yoko Ono’s song "Goodbye Sadness" for the first of several Ono tribute albums, Every Man Has a Woman in 1984. Ono says:
"Mine was trying to go away from sorrow. But in her song, it really sounds like goodbye, sadness, and you really feel that it's gone. She has the capacity to take songs as a tool to express herself, but each time she does that, it becomes Roberta. We're very close to each other and our kitchen is connected and there was a beautiful, spiritual exchange working together on this album."
Hear Flack’s version on Youtube, here:
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