Angela Bofill in 2011. Eight of her singles made the R&B Top 40, beginning with her tender version of “This Time I’ll Be Sweeter,” a soul standard by Haras Fyre and Gwen Guthrie. Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post Angela Bofill, a classically trained singer who became an R&B hitmaker in the late 1970s and ’80s, singing lush ballads and torch songs that showed off her expansive three-and-a-half-octave range, died June 13 in Vallejo, Calif.
She was 70. Her death, at the home of her daughter Shauna, was announced on social media by her manager, Rich Engel. He did not cite a cause.
Bofill’s singing career had been cut short in the mid-2000s, when she suffered a pair of strokes that led her to spend three years in rehab. Raised in the Bronx by a Cuban father and Puerto Rican mother, Bofill released her debut album in 1978, when she was just 24, and became one of the first Latina singers to find consistent success in R&B. She wrote many of her own songs, including the saxophone-backed ballad “I Try” and the funky “Too Tough,” and drew on a host of musical influences: Aretha Franklin and the Platters, James Brown and the Supremes, Tito Puente and Celia Cruz.
“There is a relaxed, sinuous quality to her phrasing that has something to do with jazz singing, but she writes songs about her life in New York and sings them in a manner that has just as much to do with the urban pop of such earlier singer-songwriters as Carole King and Laura Nyro,” New York Times music .
