KILLING ME SOFTLY WITH HIS SONG

This is my most favourite song. Of 1971. I love Roberta Flack's version best. Heard it for the first time over the radio at 3 AM at Hotel Du Rhone in Geneva in 1975.Had gone there to assist a team of officials that had come from New Delhi for secret talks with Laldenga, the head of the Mizo National Front. Couldn't sleep at night. Switched on the radio. This song was on. What a beautiful song! Have heard it being sung by others too.Roberta's is the best. She haunts me. I also love it being sung by a Filipino music group in a bar in Bangkok.I read about the bar in the International Herald Tribune in 1992. Visited it. It was lovely. And decent. But they didn't have a music group at that time.Used to play recorded music. Three or four years ago, they hired a music group from the Philippines. One of the girls in this group sings this song beautifully. Whenever I go to Bangkok, she sings it for me. The last I heard her sing it for me was on September 26,2009. A few days later, I was diagnosed with cancer. The bar supervisor is an old Thai who had worked as a batman to US soldiers in Vietnam. Whenever I went to that bar, he used to give me a chair in a special corner. We used to discuss about his experiences during the Vietnam war. Some days ago, I got a message from him asking why I have not come back again. I wrote to him, I was under treatment for cancer. He has replied back: "Please do come when you feel better. I have kept your chair vacant for you. I do not let anybody sit there. Come and sit in your favourite chair and listen to your favourite song." I was touched.Suddenly, I feel as if my cancer has been cured by his kind thoughts and words. Am singing this song again and again since this morning.---B.Raman

Strumming my pain with his fingers
Singing my life with his words
Killing me softly with his song
Killing me softly with his song
Telling my whole life with his words
Killing me softly with his song

I heard he sang a good song, I heard he had a style
And so I came to see him, to listen for a while
And there he was, this young boy, a stranger to my eyes

Strumming my pain with his fingers
Singing my life with his words
Killing me softly with his song
Killing me softly with his song
Telling my whole life with his words
Killing me softly with his song

I felt all flushed with fever, embarassed by the crowd
I felt he'd found my letters and read each one out loud
I prayed that he would finish, but he just kept right on

Strumming my pain with his fingers
Singing my life with his words
Killing me softly with his song
Killing me softly with his song
Telling my whole life with his words
Killing me softly

He sang as if he knew me in all my dark despair
And then he looked right through me as if I wasn't there
But he was there, this stranger, singing clear and loud

Strumming my pain with his fingers
Singing my life with his words
Killing me softly with his song
Killing me softly with his song
Telling my whole life with his words
Killing me softly with his song