Killing Me Softly LP Cover Art

On Monday, March 10, Stevie Wonder and Lauryn Hill were among the musical performers who paid tribute to the late Roberta Flack during the Grammy Award-winning singer’s memorial service at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. 

During the memorial service, fellow greats honored Flack’s best-known songs and associated covers, including Hill who reprised her Fugees treatment on “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” and imparted: “Her existence was a form of resistance. I adore Ms. Roberta Flack. Roberta Flack is legend.” 

Stevie Wonder joined Hill on harmonica for the famed cover, as did fellow musician contributor Wyclef Jean. During Hill’s stage time, she also honored the genre–bending songstress with a rendition of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” which was released on the late artist’s 1969 First Take LP. 

Solo, Wonder performed his own “If It’s Magic” and honored Flack on “I Can See the Sun in Late December.” In addition to songs, Wonder shared, “The great thing about not having the ability to see with your eyes is the great opportunity of being able to even better see with your heart. And so I knew how beautiful Roberta was, not seeing her visually but being able to see and feel her heart.”

Roberta Flack died on Feb. 22, 2025 at age 88. Following her passing, Hill took to social media, writing: “Whitney Houston once said to me that Roberta Flack’s voice was one of the purest voices she’d ever heard. I grew up scouring the records my Parents collected. Mrs. Flack was one of their favorites and quite instantly became one of mine as soon as I was exposed to her. She looked cool and intelligent, gentle and yet militant. The songs she recorded from ‘Compared To What’ to ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ to her version of ‘Ballad Of The Sad Young Men’ fascinated me with their beauty and sophistication.”

She continued, “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. Killing Me Softly, a song Mrs. Flack didn’t write, but made hugely popular became the song that catapulted myself and the Fugees into household phenomena. We wanted to honor the beauty and brilliance of this song and her performance of it to our generation. I will forever be grateful for the sensitivity and delicate power of her Love and Artistry. Rest in Grace Beloved One.” 

Watch a clip from Flack’s memorial service below.