Berklee Commencement Honorary Degree Recipients: Roberta Flack

"Known for her timeless songs “Feel Like Makin' Love,” “Tonight I Celebrate My Love,” “Where Is the Love,” and “The Closer I Get to You” (the latter two duets with her former Howard University classmate Donny Hathaway), Roberta Flack has been hailed as one of the greatest songstresses of our time and remains unparalleled in her ability to tell a story through her music. Born into a musical family in North Carolina, the four-time Grammy Award winner is a classically trained pianist who began playing at the age of nine. At age 15, she received a full scholarship to attend Howard University. Discovered while singing at Mr. Henry's, a nightclub in Washington, D.C., by jazz musician Les McCann, she was soon signed to Atlantic Records. From her debut album, First Take, released in 1969, Flack’s music has effortlessly traversed a broad musical landscape from pop to soul to folk to jazz. She is the only solo artist to win the Grammy Award for Record of the Year consecutively with “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” in 1973, and “Killing Me Softly with His Song” in 1974. The artist, whose music has been defying, crossing, and blending genres for more than six decades, was honored by the Recording Academy in 2020 with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. In addition to her musicianship, Flack has enriched the lives of others through her humanitarian work. In 2007, the former schoolteacher founded the Roberta Flack School of Music at the Hyde Leadership Charter School in The Bronx, which provides an innovative and inspiring music education program to underprivileged students free of charge. In 2020, she hosted a YouTube listening party with Rhino Records to raise funds for the nonprofit organization Feed the Children during the COVID-19 pandemic. Earlier this year, Penguin Random House published The Green Piano: How Little Me Found Music, Flack’s debut children’s book, which was cowritten with Tonya Bolden and recounts her childhood in a home surrounded by music and love."