The many lives of 'Killing me softly with his song'

Killing Me Softly With His Song is Roberta Flack’s big hit, but the song has had several lives. The first, perhaps the least known, is the original recording, by the American singer-songwriter Lori Lieberman in 1972, on her first self-titled album. It went unnoticed, with the authorship credited to Charles Fox (music) and Norman Gimbel (lyrics), but Lieberman has repeatedly claimed that the origin of the lyrics was a poem she had written in 1971 upon returning excited from a concert by Don McLean, an artist who has supported her. It is from that experience that the lines “I heard he sang a good song, / I heard he had a style / And so I came to see him, and listen for a while” come out. But according to the official composers, who had previously put Lieberman's name in the credits of some songs, the lyrics captured the experience in different words.

In any case, just a year later, in 1973, Flack recorded it again and made it number one in the USA, Australia and Canada (in the UK, it reached sixth place), and the song spread: already in the seventies it was covered, without the same success, by artists such as Shirley Bassie, Johnny Mathis, Engelbert Humperdinck, Sérgio Mendes and Paul Mauriat among many others.

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The Fugees, with Lauryn Hill on vocals, brought it up to date in 1996, when it reached number one in thirty countries – in Spain it remained in second place – and became one of the most notable songs in the history of hip hop. In 2008, Pitingo included it, partially in Spanish, with Juan Carmona on guitar and accompanied by the London Community Gospel Choir, on his album Soulería .