Lauryn Hill

Roberta Flack died in February 2025, and Hill's tribute — posted to Instagram days later — named a specific debt. 'Mrs. Flack was an artist, a singer-songwriter, a pianist and composer who moved me and showed me through her own creative choices and standards what else was possible within the idiom of Soul,' she wrote. Flack never wrote 'Killing Me Softly With His Song' — Hill made a point of noting it — but her recording of it 'catapulted myself and the Fugees into household phenomena' once the trio covered it in 1996.

listen: upstream & heresource: Rolling Stone — Lauryn Hill Pays Tribute to Roberta Flack ↗share

1973

Killing Me Softly With His SongRoberta Flack

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1996

Killing Me Softly (With His Song)Lauryn Hill

listen forFlack's 1973 'Killing Me Softly With His Song' is almost entirely voice and piano — she holds each line back a beat behind the rhythm, like she's deciding whether to say it at all. The Fugees' 1996 cover keeps that patience: Fugees co-founder Wyclef Jean's guitar loop drops out under Hill's vocal for whole bars at a time, leaving her alone with the melody the way Flack was. Where Flack stays hushed throughout, Hill opens into a full, gospel-edged belt on the bridge — a choir robe traded for a leather jacket.

Hill was six when she found her parents' soul records in the basement of their South Orange, New Jersey house — Curtis Mayfield among them. 'Curtis Mayfield had a huge impact on the way I grew up,' she has said, naming those basement discs, alongside The Temptations and Roberta Flack, as her 'true inspiration when making my album.' The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill carries that debt forward in its sound: strings and horns arranged with the same lush, orchestral hand Mayfield brought to Chicago soul, wrapped around lyrics that stay rooted in one specific neighborhood rather than reaching for anywhere in general.

listen: upstream & heresource: Kennedy Center — Lauryn Hill Artist Biography (Curtis Mayfield) ↗share

1970

Move On UpCurtis Mayfield

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1998

Every Ghetto, Every CityLauryn Hill

listen forMayfield's 'Move On Up' (1970) opens with a bright, insistent riff on the Clavinet — a percussive electric keyboard — that never lets go of the beat for nine minutes, riding under horns that keep building rather than resolving. Hill's 'Every Ghetto, Every City' (1998) borrows that exact chassis, the same instrument driving a full horn section, but where Mayfield sings toward an abstract better day, Hill narrates specific corners of her own South Orange childhood, block by block, turning the same production trick into autobiography instead of anthem.

On the Fugees' 1996 'Ready or Not,' a 21-year-old Hill rapped, 'I'll be Nina Simone / And defecating on your microphone' — a line brash enough that the online magazine Open Culture later credited it with introducing Simone's name to a whole generation of hip-hop fans. Nearly twenty years on, at the Apollo Theater in 2015, Hill closed a tribute performance with a plainer debt: 'Because I fed on this music... I believed I always had a right to have a voice.' She went on to record six songs, not the two she'd promised, for that year's Simone documentary soundtrack, producing the record herself alongside pianist Robert Glasper.

listen: upstream & heresource: Open Culture — How Nina Simone Became Hip Hop's 'Secret Weapon' (Nina Simone) ↗share

1965

Feeling GoodNina Simone

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2015

Feeling GoodLauryn Hill

listen forSimone's 1965 'Feeling Good' opens near-silent — just voice and a single horn line — before she pushes the word 'good' into something almost shouted, daring the band to catch up. Hill's 2015 version, cut for the tribute album Nina Revisited, keeps that same push-and-pull, but roughens the tone: her voice sits lower and smokier than Simone's, less operatic, more lived-in, an artist thirty years younger claiming the same authority through a completely different instrument.