Roberta Flack so completely owned “Killing Me Softly with His Song” — her signature tune that topped the charts in 1973 — it’s hard to believe that it wasn’t actually her song originally.
In fact, the classic — which won Flack her second consecutive Record of the Year Grammy in 1974, after “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” triumphed in 1973 — was a cover of Lori Lieberman’s original version that appeared on her 1972 self-titled debut album.
“It was a guitar-based folk song,” Lieberman, 73, told The Post. “My version was a small folk song.”
But Flack — who died at 88 on Monday after years of health challenges, including ALS — transformed “Killing Me Softly with His Song” into something much bigger, a tune for the ages.
“What she gave to that song was priceless, and something I never, ever could have imagined,” said Lieberman, who calls Flack’s definitive rendition “one of the greatest things to ever happen to me.”
“I have endless gratitude to Roberta Flack [for] hearing something within that song to bring it to the world and to change not just my life, but so many with her artistry, her talent and her heart,” she said.
But it was Lieberman who was inspired by a man who was “strumming my pain with his fingers” at LA’s Troubadour club in late 1971.
“I was finishing my first album for Capitol Records, and we needed one more song,” she recalled. “My girlfriend asked me if I wanted to go to a club to hear a singer that I’d never heard of.”
Turns out it was a certain “American Pie” troubadour.
“It was Don McLean, and when he sang ‘Empty Chairs,’ it moved me so much because it was about a breakup — and I was going through one at the time — that I wrote a poem on a napkin,” said Lieberman. “And that poem became ‘Killing Me Softly.’ I had felt that he was singing about me and my life. I went to see him, a person I’d never heard of, and I felt that he was reading my diaries.”
Songwriters Norman Gimbel and Charles Fox would turn Lieberman’s poem into song, but it was not a hit for the young singer.
That all changed when Flack discovered the tune on a flight from Los Angeles to New York.
“At that time, I was a featured artist on American Airlines — they had this in-flight system where they played the whole album,” said Lieberman. “She was listening to the music, and suddenly she heard ‘Killing Me Softly,’ and it resonated with her.”
While listening to the song multiple times on the flight, Flack began taking notes to make her own take on the tune. And she had been working out her version with her band when she she needed another song to perform as an encore while opening for Quincy Jones at LA’s Greek Theater in September 1972.
“And so she sang ‘Killing Me Softly,’ and the audience went crazy,” said Lieberman. “And when she walked off stage, Quincy Jones said, ‘Ro, don’t sing that song one more time before you record it!’ ”
Flack recorded the song for her 1973 album “Killing Me Softly,” and with the singer-pianist’s considerable skills as an interpreter and arranger, it was a far different version than Lieberman’s original. “It is almost like two different songs,” she said.
“In addition to starting the song with the chorus, she also added the ‘La, la, la, la, la, la’ part,” said Lieberman, also noting Flack’s stronger backbeat. “It opened up the song in such a way that it just took off.”
As a Flack fan, Lieberman was “overwhelmed” with pride when her jazzy soul-pop makeover killed the masses softly, becoming one of the biggest singles of 1973. And two decades later, it was Flack’s rendition that inspired the Fugees’ hit remake in 1996, exposing the song to a whole new generation.
“They would never have recorded the song from my version,” said Lieberman.
But despite the two artists being bonded by “Killing Me Softly,” Lieberman didn’t actually meet Flack until 2019 — when her health had been compromised after suffering a stroke in 2016.
“I was performing at Carnegie Hall, and she had reached out to me to be a part of her documentary [‘Roberta’] that they were doing, and it meant so much,” she said. “I went to where she was living, and she was sitting in a wheelchair by her piano … She couldn’t talk much, but she said, ‘Lori Lieberman, it’s been so long, so long. I can’t believe it.’ And it was a very, very profound moment.”
While Lieberman continues to perform and record — releasing her latest album, “Perfect Day,” in November — she credits Flack for having “emboldened me as an artist.”
“She was an incredible musician, an incredible pianist and a beautiful singer,” she said. “She’s one of the greatest artists of my generation, for sure.”
