Roberta Flack – a voice to remember

Another musical icon has departed to join the heavenly choirs. Roberta Flack’s The First Time Ever I Saw His Face and Killing Me Softly from the 1970s have gone down as all-time classics and she is described as having ‘one of the loveliest voices pop music has ever heard.’ ‘There was something almost supernatural about Flack’s singing.’

  She was born 10 February 1937 6.30am Black Mountain, North Carolina, and took to music early, singing in church choirs and gaining a full music scholarship to Howard University in Washington DC to study classical piano and orchestration. She sang jazz in nightclubs and it was in her thirties that she broke into the big time as Clint Eastwood used her song in his directorial debut Play Misty For Me and it became a blockbuster hit.

“I didn’t try to be a soul singer, a jazz singer, a blues singer,” she told the Guardian in 2020, looking back on a lifetime she’d spent honing her own voice. “My music is my expression of what I feel and believe in a moment.”

  She had a 1^st house Aquarius Sun and an Aquarius Moon on her Ascendant and a hugely complex chart. She has planets in all three creative Water signs – Mars in Scorpio trine Saturn in Pisces trine Pluto in Cancer, which Pluto in turn was opposition Mercury which would give her a sorrowful intensity. Her Saturn was in a creative opposition to an 8^th house musical Neptune square her North/South Node opposition tying her into the spirit of the age. Her Mars was in a hard-edged trine to Saturn so she learned discipline through tough experiences. But that was softened by having a midpoint to that trine of a 12^th house Jupiter which gave her inner contentment.