The heartbreak – and lawsuits – behind Roberta Flack's greatest songs

Telegraph

25-02-2025

Roberta Flack was a singer who defied categorisation. The tributes paid to her following her death have variously described her as a jazz, soul and pop singer. But while a prolific songwriter herself, Flack's great skill was to draw on songs from a range of genres and sources and make them definitively her own.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the two songs that were biggest hits and with which she will always be associated – one, Killing Me Softly With His Song, drawn from the unlikely partnership of a young folk singer and a veteran Hollywood songwriter. The other, The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, composed by an English folk singer, songwriter and political activist, who had once been on the files of MI5, described as 'a Communist with very extreme views', who wrote more than 300 songs but who never himself actually recorded the one he is most famous for.
That 'Communist' – he was a party member – was Ewan MacColl. Peggy Seeger – the sister of folk singer Pete – had first set eyes on him in 1956 when, newly arrived in London, she sang at an audition for a new folk group, the Ramblers.
There was applause when she had finished the song, she recalled later, but not from the man sitting in the corner, 'a cigarette burning down to his fingers, just looking, staring'. Then he introduced himself, 'thick straight black hair and a very red beard… my next thirty-three years.' MacColl was 41, Seeger just 21.
A few weeks later she wrote in her diary. 'Ewan MacColl is in love with me. And I with him. He is married with a boy of five years. I would lose my personality were I to marry him.'
Running away from what seemed like a hopeless love affair, Seeger returned to America where she sang regularly on a Los Angeles radio station. Her repertoire at the time consisted entirely of traditional folk songs, all, she remembered, 'concerned with death, destruction, murder, and misogyny. They liked the folk-song love songs,vbut oh they're all so sad. Have you got a hopeful love song?'
She telephoned MacColl to ask for his help. He told her he had a song he had written about her. ''Here it is,' he said. 'And he sang it over the phone.'
'The first time ever I saw your face, I thought the sun rose in your eyes' – the lines were unintentionally ironic. The first time MacColl actually saw her face, she recalled, she was suffering from chronic acne and constantly soaking her face in Dettol.
Seeger started performing the song at shows in America, and over the years it went on to be recorded by a number of folk singers, including the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary and Gordon Lightfoot – and Elvis Presley. MacColl hated them all, describing the Elvis version as being like Romeo at the bottom of the Post Office Tower singing up to Juliet.
It eventually came to the attention of Flack who in 1969 recorded it on her first album, First Take, at the Atlantic records studio in New York.
But it would be another three years before it was released as a single, after Clint Eastwood had included the song in his 1971 film Play Misty For Me, about a late-night radio dj, telling Flack 'I'd like to use it in the only part of the movie where there's absolute love.' Eastwood paid $2,000 for the rights to use the song.
Flack would later recall that when she recorded the song she was thinking about a different kind of love – for her cat that had just been run over by a car.
The song went on to spend six consecutive weeks at number one on the American charts, earning Flack her first million selling gold record.
By the time Flack had a hit with the song, Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl had reunited and were living together, songwriting and performing, and doing their best to make ends meet.
In 1971 they received a royalty check from Flack's version of The First Time Ever… for $75,000. Seeger wrote that it was the end of scraping, worrying and having to take every single paying job. She started cooking elaborate five course meals. MacColl had long since divorced. Now, 21 years after he and Seeger had first met, they married – on the advice, Seeger said, of their accountant – went home and got drunk.
At around the time Seeger and MacColl were celebrating their royalty check for The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, the singer Don McLean was performing at the Troubadour club in Los Angeles. McLean had just released American Pie, the album that was shortly to make him an international star.
Sitting in the audience was a 20-year-old folk singer named Lori Lieberman. Inspired by McLean singing his song Empty Chairs – inspired by his former wife – Lieberman began writing poetic notes on a paper napkin.
At the time, Lieberman was signed to a five-year management contract with the veteran songwriter Norman Gimbel and composer Charles Fox, during which they would receive 20 per cent of her earnings. Among Gimbel's accomplishments was writing the English lyrics for Astrud Gilberto and Stan Getz's The Girl From Ipanema. And with Fox, he also wrote the theme songs for numerous American TV shows, including Happy Days and Love Boat.
Gimbel was also having an affair with Lieberman, despite being 24 years older and married. 'I would hide on the floorboard of his car as we drove through Beverly Hills and it was the craziest thing,' she told Geoff Edgers, a journalist for the Washington Post in an interview in 2020.
After seeing McLean's performance, Lieberman phoned Gimbel telling him about the effect watching McLean had on her and reading him the notes she'd made.
'Lori is only 20 and she really is a very private person,' Gimbel told the New York Daily News in 1973. 'She told us about this strong experience she had listening to McLean. I had a notion this might make a good song so the three of us discussed it. We talked it over several times, just as we did with the rest of the numbers we wrote for the album and we all felt it had possibilities.'
Lieberman had a phrase ringing in her head from a novel she'd been reading about a jazz musician by Julio Cortazar, 'killing me softly with his blues'. But, Lieberman felt the word 'blues' didn't describe the effect McLean had on her, and suggested changing it to 'killing me softly with his song'.
In 1972, Lieberman released her own version of the song, and, following a script that Gimbel had given her, would often preface any live performance by telling the story of how it had been inspired by seeing Don McLean. It was a good story, after all – and one that Gimbel himself would often repeat when talking of the song. 'Her conversation fed me, inspired me, gave me some language and a choice of words,' he told the Asbury Park Press in a story published early in 1973.
But he and Fox would excise Lieberman from the writing credits, which read 'N. Gimbel-C.Fox' – and from the publishing royalties.
Lieberman says she didn't mind when her first album came out and she got writing credit for just one of the 10 songs. 'I was just so grateful that they had plucked this young, naive girl,' she told Edgers. 'And honestly, I was completely overwhelmed.' It was only later the scales fell from her eyes.
In 1972, in the wake of her success with The First Time Ever I Saw Her Face, Roberta Flack was on a plane ride to Los Angeles when she heard Lieberman's version of Killing Me Softly on the in-flight entertainment.
Flack would recall how the song 'smacked me in the face', and – much like Lieberman seeing Don McLean the year before – she reached for a sheet of paper, and played the song 'eight to ten times' transcribing the melody. On landing she immediately contacted her friend Quincy Jones asking how she might meet Charles Fox. 'Two days later I had the music.'
In 1972 she recorded the song at the Atlantic studios. Released in January 1973, the song would spend five consecutive weeks at number one on the American charts, giving Flack her second gold record.
Things, however, were not going so well for Lieberman. She had recorded four albums, only one of which had charted, and in 1976 the business relationship between her and Gimbel and Fox broke down. According to the account in the Washington Post, Lieberman claimed that Gimbel had become emotionally abusive, controlling and unfaithful.
She broke off with him and asked to be released from her contract. But Gimbel and Fox refused, instead allegedly demanding she reimburse them $27,000 a number of expenses including recording costs and hotel bills, and telling her that if she left the contract she would also owe them a portion of her future earnings up to $250,000. Rather than fight the case, Lieberman, who was living with her mother, retired from performing to start a family, not returning to music until the 1990s.
Gimbel, meanwhile, was doing all he could to write Lieberman and Don McLean out of the story behind Killing Me Softly. In 2008 he even threatened to sue McLean if the singer did not remove the 1973 New York Daily News article referencing McLean's connection to the song from his website.
On the day Gimbel died in 2018, at the age of 91, McLean posted a message on his Facebook page in which he called the dead writer 'abusive and obnoxious'.
In 2010, Charles Fox, who is now 84, wrote his own memoir, Killing Me Softly, My Life In Music, which purported to provide a 'full personal account of his experiences in writing the song with Norman Gimbel and what the song meant to him', not mentioning Lieberman's story about being inspired by Don McLean, but noting 'I still have a special place in my heart for her.'
Asked in an interview with the website Song Facts, if it was correct that Killing Me Softly was inspired by Don McLean, Fox replied 'the answer is no', describing Lieberman's account as 'an urban legend or something'.
He and Gimbel, he said, had written the song and then presented it to Lieberman. 'She loved it; she said it reminded her of being at a Don McLean concert. So in her act, when she would appear, she would say that. And somehow the words got changed around so that we wrote it based on Don McLean.'
In 2019, Flack met Lieberman for the first time, and in 2020 Flack emailed the Washington Post saying that she had cried when she first heard about the conflict over the song, adding 'I hope that Lori knows that I am forever grateful for her part in the writing of the song.'
For her part, Lieberman told Geoff Edgers that she had long ago given up any thought of receiving song writing royalties. She just wanted her part in it to be recognised,
'I have been called a liar. And it feels terrible. It's really for my own integrity and for the truth to come out.'
She has continued to record and perform over the years. In 2024 she released an album Perfect Day, including songs by Lou Reed, Scott Walker and Tracy Chapman. But she never felt comfortable singing Killing Me Softly herself, until Flack and Don McLean acknowledged her part in it.