How Roberta Flack made ‘Killing Me Softly’ her own — and changed original singer Lori Lieberman’s life: ‘I have endless gratitude’

nypost.com:

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.