Know Your Tunes for Week of 3/24/25

Killing Me Softly With His Song

The late great singer and pianist, Roberta Flack, passed away on February 25th, 2025. She was 88 years old. Flack was the first artist to win the Grammy Award for Record of the Year in two consecutive years: “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” won in 1973 and “Killing Me Softly with His Song” won in 1974.

"Killing Me Softly With His Song" was written by the songwriting team of Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel who also wrote the theme songs to the TV series Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley. 

When Songfacts spoke with Charles Fox in 2010 he recounted how they wrote the song "Killing Me Softly With His Song".  Norman Gimbel and I wrote that song for a young artist whose name was Lori Lieberman. Norman had a book that he would put titles of songs, song ideas and lyrics or something that struck him at different times. And he pulled out the book and he was looking through it, and he says, 'Hey, what about a song title, 'Killing Me Softly With His Blues'?' Well, the 'killing me softly' part sounded very interesting, 'with his blues' sounded old fashioned in 1972 when we wrote it. So he thought for a while and he said, 'What about 'killing me softly with his song'? That has a unique twist to it.'

So we discussed what it could be, and obviously it's about a song - listening to the song and being moved by the words. It's like the words are speaking to what that person's life is. Anyway, Norman went home and wrote an extraordinary lyric and called me later in the afternoon. I jotted it down over the phone. I sat down and the music just flowed right along with the words. And we got together the next morning and made a couple of adjustments with it and we played it for Lori, and she loved it. She said it reminds 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 the legend goes that we wrote it based on Don McLean, but we did not.

Flack heard Lori Lieberman's version on an in-flight tape recorder while flying from Los Angeles to New York. She loved the title and lyrics and decided to record it herself. In an interview with The New Musical Express, Flack said: "I was flicking through the in-flight magazine to see if they'd done an article on me. After realizing they hadn't, I saw this picture of a little girl called Lori Lieberman. I'd never heard of her before so I read it with interest to see what she had that I didn't."

Flack decided to record the song but felt it wasn't complete, so on arriving in New York she went into the studio and started experimenting. She changed the chord structure and ended the song with a major rather than minor chord. Flack worked on the song in the studio for three months, playing around with various chord structures until she got it just right.