The story of Lauryn Hill

A New Jersey childhood full of records

Lauryn Noelle Hill was born on the twenty sixth of May 1975 in East Orange, New Jersey, and grew up in the leafy suburb of South Orange nearby. Her mother Valerie taught English, and her father Mal worked as a computer and management consultant who also sang at weddings and in local clubs. She had one older brother, Malaney. The house was full of music. Her mother played piano, and young Lauryn dug through her parents' old soul records, falling for Curtis Mayfield, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin and Gladys Knight. She later remembered playing Marvin Gaye's What's Going On over and over until she fell asleep to it.[1] [2] [3]

She was a performer almost from the start, and she later joked that she had been a real ham as a child. In middle school she sang The Star Spangled Banner before a basketball game, and it went down so well that a recording of her version was played at later games. In 1988, at thirteen, she entered Amateur Night at the Apollo Theater in Harlem and sang Smokey Robinson's Who's Lovin' You. She stumbled early and the famously tough crowd reacted, and afterwards she cried. Her mother gently asked whether this life was really for her. Lauryn looked at her as if she had lost her mind.[1] [2] [3]

At Columbia High School in Maplewood she was a straight A student in advanced classes, ran track, was a cheerleader, took violin and dance lessons, and started the school's gospel choir. The actor Zach Braff was a classmate. Teachers saw her as a natural leader. She later said the drive was less about academics than about achieving, whatever the field happened to be. It was also at Columbia High that an older student with Haitian roots, Prakazrel Michel, known as Pras, came looking for singers for a music group he was putting together. That meeting would shape the rest of her life.[1] [2] [3]

Soap operas, nuns and a band called Tranzlator Crew

Pras and Lauryn started out in a trio with a friend, and then Pras brought in his cousin, a young Haitian born musician named Wyclef Jean, who could play almost anything. The friend soon drifted off. They called themselves Tranzlator Crew, because they liked the idea of rhyming in different languages, and they played talent shows and local showcases. Lauryn began as the singer, but she taught herself to rap too, modelling her flow on male rappers like Ice Cube rather than on the women in the game. She later said she used to do her homework in the bathroom stalls of hip hop clubs.[1] [2] [3]

Acting ran alongside the music. In 1991 she appeared with Wyclef in Club Twelve, an off Broadway hip hop take on Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, and although the show flopped, an agent spotted her. Later that year she landed a recurring role on the soap opera As the World Turns, playing a troubled teenager called Kira Johnson. In 1993 came two films. In Steven Soderbergh's King of the Hill she had a small but memorable scene as a gum chewing elevator operator. And in Sister Act 2 she played Rita Watson, the sullen student with a big voice, opposite Whoopi Goldberg.[1] [2] [3]

Sister Act 2 was panned by critics, but Lauryn stole it. Her duet of His Eye Is on the Sparrow with Tanya Blount became the scene everyone remembered, and the director Bill Duke said a rap she did in one scene was entirely her own improvisation. Roger Ebert praised her big joyful voice while grumbling that the film wasted it. Over the years the film became a cult favourite, and a string of singers have named her performance as the reason they took up music. She graduated from high school that same year, and she quietly put her acting money into keeping the band going.[1] [2]

In 1993 the trio signed with Ruffhouse Records, which was distributed by Columbia, and changed their name to the Fugees, short for refugees. It was a word often thrown as an insult at Haitian Americans, and they took it back on purpose. Their debut album, Blunted on Reality, finally came out in February 1994 after a dispute with the label. It sold poorly. The group later said they had let producers and management push them toward a tougher, gangsta image that did not fit them. Even so, listeners noticed the young woman in the middle, known in the group as L Boogie, and her verse on Some Seek Stardom.[1] [2] [3]

The Score and the height of the Fugees

For their second album the Fugees took control. The Score arrived in February 1996, mixing hip hop with reggae, soul and live instruments, and it went to number one on the Billboard 200 and stayed in the top ten for more than six months. Worldwide it sold more than twenty million copies, and it won the Grammy for Best Rap Album, making Lauryn the first woman ever to win that award. At a time when the feud between the East and West Coasts was dominating rap, the Fugees offered something warmer and more political, and Lauryn was quoted saying they wanted to put something positive into the music.[1] [2] [3]

The song that made her a star was a cover. Pras suggested reworking Killing Me Softly with His Song, the Roberta Flack hit from 1973, and it was the last track recorded for the album, built on a sample of A Tribe Called Quest's Bonita Applebum. The group wanted to rewrite the words with an anti drug message, but the songwriters said no, so Lauryn sang the original words over a new beat. It went to number one in twenty countries and won a Grammy. It never appeared on the American Hot 100, because it was not sold as a single there, yet it was everywhere on radio. Flack herself made a cameo in the video.[1] [2] [3]

Ready or Not followed, built on the Delfonics and on a sample of Enya's Boadicea that nobody had cleared. Enya considered suing, then settled for credit and royalties once she realised the Fugees were not a gangsta act, and the group thanked her warmly afterwards. The video, directed by Marcus Nispel, reportedly cost around one point three million dollars, one of the first rap videos with a seven figure budget. At twenty one, with five million albums sold, Lauryn was still living in her parents' house in South Orange, and she had quietly left Columbia University after about a year of study once sales reached the millions.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Behind the success, the group was tangled up in a secret romance. Lauryn and Wyclef had been involved since around 1992, and it continued after Wyclef married his girlfriend Claudinette in 1994. In the summer of 1996, on the Smokin' Grooves tour, Lauryn met Rohan Marley, a son of Bob Marley and a former University of Miami linebacker. She became pregnant late that year, and the radio host Wendy Williams broke the news on air before Lauryn had told anyone who she was dating. Her son Zion David was born on the third of August 1997. That year the Fugees stopped working together, and all three went solo.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Making The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill

Lauryn had been talking about a solo record for a long time, and she felt the group had backed everyone's solo plans except hers. When Wyclef finally offered to produce it, she turned him down. The label floated big name producers, including RZA of the Wu Tang Clan, but she insisted on writing, arranging and producing it herself. She assembled a young team of New Jersey musicians she named New Ark, brought in the engineer Gordon Williams, known as Commissioner Gordon, as her co pilot, and worked with the producers Che Pope and James Poyser. Many songs were written in her attic studio in South Orange.[1] [2] [3]

Recording began in September 1997 at Chung King Studios in New York. On the first day she ordered in every instrument she loved, harps, strings, timpani, organs and clarinets, because she wanted the record to sound human rather than perfect. Several songs began life as pieces for other artists and turned too personal to give away. Ex Factor was first written for a girl group, and I Used to Love Him came out of a conversation about her relationship with Wyclef. Rohan Marley later claimed that when Lauryn and her mother first played early versions to executives at Sony, they dismissed it as coffee table music.[1] [2]

Feeling crowded in New York, she moved much of the work to Tuff Gong, the studio Bob Marley built in Kingston, Jamaica. Marley's sons drifted in and out, and Julian Marley played guitar on Forgive Them Father. On the first morning, surrounded by a crowd of Marley grandchildren, she started trying out a verse, and the kids began chanting the last word of each line back at her. That became Lost Ones, which nods to the studio's address on Hope Road. The title came late. She wanted something like The Education of Sonny Carson, and her team pushed for a humbler twist inspired by Carter G. Woodson's The Mis Education of the Negro.[1] [2] [3]

The guests were remarkable. Carlos Santana played Spanish guitar on To Zion, her song about choosing to have her son when people around her urged her to end the pregnancy for the sake of her career, and in return she wrote and produced a track for his album Supernatural. D'Angelo sang on Nothing Even Matters and laid down his vocal within an hour. A college student called John Stephens, later known as John Legend, played piano on Everything Is Everything. The classroom interludes feature the poet and teacher Ras Baraka, talking about love with children gathered in Lauryn's living room. The album was finished in June 1998.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Five Grammys in one night

The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill came out in America on the twenty fifth of August 1998. It sold about four hundred and twenty two thousand copies in its first week, the biggest opening ever for a woman at the time, and entered the Billboard 200 at number one. Its lead single, Doo Wop That Thing, had already debuted at number one on the Hot 100, the first song by a female rapper to top that chart. Critics called it the best album of the year. In November 1998 she gave birth to her second child with Rohan Marley, a daughter named Selah.[1] [2] [3] [4]

At the Grammys on the twenty fourth of February 1999 she had ten nominations, a record for a woman, and won five, another record. She took Album of the Year, the first ever for a hip hop album, plus Best New Artist, Best R&B Album, Best Female R&B Vocal Performance and Best R&B Song. On stage she told the room this was crazy, because it was hip hop music. She became the first rapper on the cover of Time magazine. The Doo Wop video, with its split screen block party set in 1967 and 1998, became the first hip hop clip to win Video of the Year at the MTV awards.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The Miseducation Tour opened at the Budokan in Tokyo in January 1999, with OutKast, Busta Rhymes and the Roots as support, and Armani and Levi's dressing her on stage. The Los Angeles Times called it perhaps the most accomplished tour ever by a hip hop artist. She also became the collaborator everyone wanted. She wrote and produced A Rose Is Still a Rose for Aretha Franklin and directed its video, wrote All That I Can Say for Mary J. Blige, sang on a posthumous duet with Bob Marley on Turn Your Lights Down Low, and shared Album of the Year the next year for her work on Santana's Supernatural.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The triumph soured quickly. In November 1998 the four New Ark musicians, Vada Nobles, Rasheem Pugh, Tejumold Newton and Johari Newton, filed a fifty page lawsuit saying they had helped write and produce the album but had been left almost uncredited. They asked for partial writing credit on thirteen of the fourteen songs. Lauryn said they had been credited properly and were trying to profit from her success. The case dragged through depositions in 2000, including her own, and was settled in February 2001, reportedly for five million dollars. A friend later said it was the start of a chain reaction that turned everything a little crazy.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Walking away from fame

Hollywood came calling after the Grammys. According to Rolling Stone she was offered the part in Charlie's Angels that went to Lucy Liu, met about roles in The Bourne Identity, The Mexican and the Matrix sequels, and accepted a lead role in the film of Toni Morrison's Beloved before pregnancy forced her out. She began developing a Bob Marley biopic in which she would play his wife Rita. Instead, around 2000, she stepped back from public life. She hated that a trip to the grocery store required perfect clothes and makeup, and she fired her management and stopped giving interviews, watching television or even listening to music.[1] [2] [3]

Around this time she began attending Bible study with a spiritual adviser known only as Brother Anthony, at first a few times a week and then almost daily. Her former manager Jayson Jackson said she asked him to come too, and they drifted apart when he would not. Friends told Rolling Stone that Brother Anthony seemed controlling, and Pras later described a tape of his teachings as sounding like a cult. Lauryn, for her part, said she had met someone with a deeper understanding of scripture than anyone she knew. She later described those years as a time of confronting fear and insecurity about being young, Black and gifted.[1] [2] [3]

On the twenty first of July 2001, pregnant with her third child, she taped an episode of MTV Unplugged in Times Square, alone with an acoustic guitar she had only recently learned to play. She had strained her voice in rehearsal the day before and refused to reschedule. She played only new songs and talked at length between them about fame, faith and the illusion of her public persona. Released in May 2002, after a delay caused by the September eleventh attacks, MTV Unplugged No. 2.0 went to number three and later platinum, but critics were split. Some called it a breakdown in public. Others called it brave and ahead of its time.[1] [2] [3]

Her son Joshua was born in December 2001, and a fourth child followed. She and Rohan Marley never legally married, although she sometimes called him her husband, and in 2003 Rolling Stone reported that he had married another woman in 1993. Marley later produced a divorce document from 1996. In December 2003, at a Christmas concert at the Vatican, she read an unscheduled statement condemning the Catholic Church over child sexual abuse by priests and its cover up, with senior cardinals in the audience. Her remarks were cut from the Italian television broadcast. Many critics have since applauded her for saying it.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Reunions that fell apart

On the eighteenth of September 2004 the three Fugees reunited on a street in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, for the concert filmed as Dave Chappelle's Block Party. Lauryn's almost unaccompanied Killing Me Softly was the moment everyone talked about when the film came out in 2006. The group opened the BET Awards in June 2005, leaked a new song called Take It Easy, and toured Europe late that year. But the old tensions returned. Wyclef and Pras blamed Lauryn, pointing to her lateness and her insistence on being addressed as Ms. Hill, and the planned album never happened.[1] [2]

The fallout was public. In 2007 Pras said the reunion album was dead and that he was fed up, joking that you would sooner see Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush having coffee together than another Fugees reunion. Wyclef told a British magazine that he felt Lauryn needed help. Lauryn kept touring on her own, often to mixed reviews. She sometimes arrived hours late, reworked her hits into faster, unfamiliar arrangements, and was occasionally booed. In 2009 she collapsed on stage at the start of a European festival show, and the rest of that tour was cancelled for health reasons.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Family was at the centre of her life. Her fifth child with Rohan Marley, a daughter named Sara, was born in 2008, although the couple were by then living apart, and she moved back to South Orange with her mother and children. In July 2011 she gave birth to her sixth child, a son named Micah, and made clear that Marley was not the father. She said the two of them had a long and complex history, about which many inaccurate things had been reported, and that their five children together remained a joy to them both. The father of Micah has never been publicly named.[1] [2] [3]

There were flashes of the old brilliance. She headlined festivals in New Zealand and Australia in early 2010 and played her first American show in years that summer. At the Rock the Bells festival she performed Miseducation in full for the first time, though reviewers were divided over her changed arrangements. She also sparked long running arguments about her punctuality. She was ninety minutes late at the Nice Jazz Festival in 2007, and two and a half hours late in Boston in 2010. Her fans kept buying tickets anyway, and NPR called her voice the story of the hip hop generation.[1] [2] [3]

Tax charges, prison and protest songs

In June 2012 federal prosecutors in New Jersey charged her with failing to file tax returns for 2005, 2006 and 2007, years in which she earned more than one point eight million dollars from touring, royalties and four companies she owned. She pleaded guilty. In a long post online she said she had gone underground to protect herself and her family from a hostile industry, and that she had paid her taxes while she was working without interference. In April 2013 the judge, Madeline Cox Arleo, scolded her for having repaid very little, saying she was not someone who stood before the court penniless.[1] [2] [3]

To raise money she signed a deal with Sony to start her own label, and on the fourth of May 2013 she rushed out Neurotic Society, her first official single in more than a decade, saying a legal deadline required it. Two days later she was sentenced to three months in federal prison, followed by three months of home confinement and a year of probation, plus a sixty thousand dollar fine. In court she said her music had earned others around six hundred million dollars, and compared her position to slavery. The judge noted she had by then paid the back taxes she owed.[1] [2] [3] [4]

She reported to the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, on the eighth of July 2013 and was released on the fourth of October, a few days early for good behaviour. While inside she finished a new single, Consumerism, by passing instructions out by phone and email. The judge let her postpone part of her home confinement to tour. In the years that followed she channelled her anger into protest. Black Rage, a dark reworking of the melody of My Favorite Things about racism in America, was released online in August 2014 and dedicated to the protesters in Ferguson after the police killing of Michael Brown.[1] [2]

In 2014 she narrated Concerning Violence, a Swedish documentary about African liberation struggles. In 2015 she cancelled a concert near Tel Aviv three days before the show, after a boycott campaign, saying she had also hoped to play Ramallah and did not want her presence misread by either her Israeli or Palestinian fans. That year she sang six songs on a tribute album for the Nina Simone documentary What Happened, Miss Simone?, and NPR called it her most complete set of studio recordings since Miseducation. In 2016 she was over two hours late in Atlanta, played under forty minutes, and explained she had been aligning her energy with the time.[1] [2] [3]

Anniversaries, lawsuits and a lasting legacy

In 2018 she took Miseducation around the world for its twentieth anniversary, with guests including Nas, Big Boi and SZA. The shows were praised and criticised in equal measure. In Sydney in February 2019 she arrived around ninety minutes late and clearly ill, struggling to reach the notes while fans sang for her, and many demanded refunds. Meanwhile her influence kept growing. Back in 2018 Drake had built Nice for What around Ex Factor and Cardi B reworked it for Be Careful. In 2021 Miseducation was certified diamond for ten million units in America, the first diamond record by a female rapper.[1] [2] [3] [4]

A Fugees reunion tour for the twenty fifth anniversary of The Score was announced in 2021 and cancelled early in 2022, officially because of the pandemic. Pras was also facing federal charges over illegal foreign donations to Barack Obama's 2012 campaign and lobbying linked to the Malaysian financier Jho Low, and in April 2023 a jury convicted him on ten counts. Later that year Lauryn toured Miseducation's twenty fifth anniversary with the Fugees opening. She postponed shows with a serious vocal strain, admitting she had been masking it with the steroid prednisone. In Los Angeles she told fans complaining about her lateness that they were lucky she made it on stage at all.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Her son Joshua, now performing as YG Marley, stole the tour with his song Praise Jah in the Moonlight, which went viral and reached the top forty of the Hot 100 in 2024. At his Coachella set on the fourteenth of April 2024 Lauryn walked out, then brought on Wyclef for Killing Me Softly, Ready or Not and Fu Gee La. But in August the North American leg of the joint tour was cancelled three days before it began. She blamed media clickbait for weak ticket sales. The European dates went ahead that autumn. Pras released a diss track, then sued her in October 2024 for fraud and breach of contract.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

In November 2025 Pras was sentenced to fourteen years in prison in the campaign finance case, and said he would appeal. Lauryn's old friend D'Angelo died of pancreatic cancer in October 2025, aged fifty one, months after Roberta Flack's death. At the Grammys on the first of February 2026, her first Grammy performance since 1999, Lauryn led the tribute to both, singing Nothing Even Matters alongside D'Angelo's recorded voice and closing with Wyclef on Killing Me Softly. As of 2026 Miseducation is still her only studio album, yet it sits near the top of greatest album lists and echoes through the work of Drake, Kanye West, Nicki Minaj and many more.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

The people around Lauryn Hill

Lauryn Hill and Wyclef Jean. Pras's cousin Wyclef joined the teenage group, taught Lauryn about flow by his own account, and became her secret partner from around 1992, even after marrying Claudinette in 1994. The affair and her pregnancy by Rohan Marley broke the Fugees apart, and Ex Factor and I Used to Love Him are widely heard as being about him. Decades later they reunited on stage at Coachella in 2024 and at the 2026 Grammys.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Lauryn Hill and Pras Michel. Pras recruited her at Columbia High School and co founded the Fugees. In 2003 he defended her, saying she was not crazy. After the 2005 reunion collapsed he said he was fed up with her, and after the 2024 tour was cancelled he released a diss track and sued her for fraud. She answered that he owed her money she had lent him. He was convicted in 2023 in a campaign finance case and sentenced in 2025.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Lauryn Hill and Rohan Marley. Bob Marley's son met her on the Smokin' Grooves tour in 1996. They had five children together, including Zion, Selah, Joshua and Sara, but never legally married, and mostly lived apart. Rolling Stone reported in 2003 that he had an earlier marriage, and he later produced a 1996 divorce document. He took the children while she was in prison in 2013, and has always defended her against critics.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Lauryn Hill and YG Marley. Her son Joshua was born in December 2001, months after she taped MTV Unplugged while pregnant with him. He grew up joining her on stage, and at nine told a crowd he wanted to rap. On her 2023 anniversary tour his song Praise Jah in the Moonlight went viral, and at Coachella in 2024 he brought his mother out as a surprise guest.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Lauryn Hill and Carlos Santana. She grew up on her parents' copy of Santana's Abraxas and sought him out for To Zion. It became a swap. He played Spanish guitar on her song, recorded in Miami, and she wrote, produced and rapped on Do You Like the Way for his comeback album Supernatural, which won Album of the Year the following year. They performed To Zion together at the 1999 Grammys.[1] [2] [3]

Lauryn Hill and D'Angelo. The two neo soul pioneers recorded Nothing Even Matters in 1998, after she played him demos at her New Jersey home. He cut his vocal in about an hour and played electric piano on it. They never sang it together on stage. After his death from cancer in October 2025, she led his Grammy tribute in 2026, singing the duet over his recorded voice.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Lauryn Hill and Roberta Flack. Flack's 1973 hit Killing Me Softly with His Song became the Fugees' breakthrough in 1996, and Flack appeared in their video and later performed it with them. Lauryn modelled Nothing Even Matters on the Flack and Donny Hathaway duets. After Flack died in February 2025, Lauryn led her Grammy tribute with Wyclef in 2026.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Lauryn Hill and John Legend. In 1998 a University of Pennsylvania student called John Stephens gave a friend a ride to Lauryn's house, played her a couple of songs, and ended up on piano on Everything Is Everything. It was his first commercial credit, and he credits her with launching him. Nearly thirty years later he sang in her 2026 Grammy tribute.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Lauryn Hill and Aretha Franklin. Franklin was one of the voices Lauryn grew up on. In 1997, while preparing Miseducation, Lauryn went to Detroit to write and produce A Rose Is Still a Rose for her, and Franklin had her direct the video. The song became a late career hit and earned Lauryn a Grammy nomination. A bassist on the sessions later sued, claiming he wrote the melody.[1] [2] [3]

Lauryn Hill and Vada Nobles and New Ark. She named the young New Jersey collective New Ark and made them the core of her Miseducation team, without contracts, saying the work was blessed and not about documents. Months after release they sued for credit, and the case was settled in 2001. Nobles later said he and a bandmate made peace with her at her house after the depositions, and never heard from her again.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Rare facts about Lauryn Hill

• At thirteen she cried after a rough night at the Apollo, and her mother asked whether performing was really for her. After her 1988 Amateur Night appearance, Valerie Hill suggested that if Lauryn cried every time a crowd did not cheer, this life might not suit her. Lauryn looked at her as though she had lost her mind.[1] [2]
• Her middle school basketball games kept playing a recording of her singing The Star Spangled Banner. She sang it before one game, and it was so popular that a recording of her version was used at later games instead of a live singer.[1]
• The actor Zach Braff was her classmate at Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey. At the same school she ran track, cheered, and founded the gospel choir, while taking advanced classes and earning mostly top grades.[1]
• The Fugees started out as Tranzlator Crew, because they wanted to rhyme in different languages. Pras, Lauryn and Wyclef performed under that name at talent shows before signing to Ruffhouse in 1993 and becoming the Fugees.[1] [2]
• She used her acting pay from soap operas and films to help fund the early Fugees. Money from As the World Turns and Sister Act 2 helped keep the group going before they had a record deal.[1]
• At twenty one, with five million albums sold, she still lived in her parents' house in South Orange. A 1996 Rolling Stone visit found her sharing the modest family home with her parents and brother while The Score sat in the top ten.[1] [2]
• She studied at Columbia University for about a year before The Score's sales made it impossible. She had considered majoring in history, but left once the album's sales climbed into the millions.[1]
• The songwriters of Killing Me Softly refused to let the Fugees rewrite its lyrics. The group wanted an anti drug, anti poverty version. Norman Gimbel and Charles Fox said no, so Lauryn sang the original words over a new beat.[1]
• The Fugees' Killing Me Softly was the first single ever to debut at number one in Germany. It topped charts in twenty countries, yet never appeared on the American Hot 100 because it was not sold as a single there.[1]
• The Fugees nearly got sued by Enya over Ready or Not. They sampled her song Boadicea without asking. She settled for credit and royalties after realising they were not a gangsta act.[1] [2]
• The hidden track Can't Take My Eyes Off You was recorded with Lauryn lying on the floor, eight months pregnant. Commissioner Gordon said she sang it almost entirely in one take, beatbox included, in his small home studio after radio stations started playing it.[1] [2]
• John Legend's first commercial credit was piano on Everything Is Everything, played as a University of Pennsylvania student. He said it made him known around campus as the guy who played on the song for his whole senior year.[1] [2]
• The teacher in Miseducation's classroom interludes is the poet and politician Ras Baraka, improvising with children in Lauryn's living room. She asked him to talk to a group of kids about love. He wrote the word on a blackboard and they simply talked.[1] [2]
• Lost Ones was born when a crowd of Bob Marley's grandchildren chanted along to a verse she was trying out. It happened on the first morning at Tuff Gong in Kingston, with Marley family members drifting through the studio.[1] [2]
• Lost Ones slips in a reference to Hope Road, the Kingston address where part of the album was recorded. Tuff Gong and the Bob Marley Museum sit at fifty six Hope Road, where Lost Ones and Forgive Them Father were made.[1] [2]
• The final mix of Doo Wop That Thing ran to one hundred and twenty eight tracks. Commissioner Gordon had two forty eight track machines and two twenty four track machines running at once at Sony's studios.[1]
• The Miseducation album cover was shot at her old high school and retouched to look carved into a wooden desk. The photo session took place across Columbia High School's classroom, hallway, bathroom and school bus.[1]
• Miseducation was released in Japan six days before it came out in the United States. It came out in Japan on the nineteenth of August 1998, and in America on the twenty fifth.[1]
• She directed the music video for Aretha Franklin's A Rose Is Still a Rose, which she had also written and produced. Franklin asked her to direct it after Lauryn wrote the song for her in Detroit in 1997.[1]
• Her part in Charlie's Angels reportedly went to Lucy Liu after she turned it down. Rolling Stone reported she also met about The Bourne Identity and the Matrix sequels, and dropped out of Beloved because of pregnancy.[1]
• John Galliano built a Dior collection around her, which introduced the famous Saddle Bag. His Spring Summer 2000 show featured models with dreadlocks and hoop earrings inspired by Lauryn.[1]
• In 1999 Billboard renamed its R&B charts to include hip hop, citing Lauryn as the prime example of blurred genres. The charts became R&B Hip Hop charts, and she was the only act named when Billboard explained the change.[1]
• Amy Winehouse was discovered partly because of Miseducation. Manager Nick Shymansky went looking for an artist like Lauryn and found Winehouse, who then worked with Miseducation's engineer Commissioner Gordon on her debut album Frank.[1]
• She introduced John Forté to the Fugees, and he later co wrote and produced songs on The Score. Forté was nominated for a Grammy at twenty one. He was later jailed on cocaine charges, and his sentence was commuted in 2008.[1]
• She taped MTV Unplugged with a throat she had damaged at rehearsal the day before, refusing to reschedule. She was also pregnant with her son Joshua, who later became the reggae singer YG Marley.[1] [2]
• While in prison in 2013 she finished a single, Consumerism, by sending instructions out by phone and email. She was released from the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, on the fourth of October 2013, a few days early.[1]
• Her protest song Black Rage uses the melody of My Favorite Things from The Sound of Music. She first performed it as a spoken poem in 2012, then released it in 2014, dedicated to protesters in Ferguson.[1]
• She narrated Concerning Violence, a 2014 Swedish documentary about African liberation movements. The award winning film covers the liberation struggles of the nineteen sixties and seventies, and her voice guides viewers through it.[1]
• After tax charges, she told the judge her music had earned others around six hundred million dollars. She said someone had done the math, and asked how she could then be struggling to pay a tax bill.[1]
• In 2003 she replied to a Rolling Stone interview request saying she would only talk if properly paid. The reply was signed Ms. Hill. Friends said she felt exploited by the media and the record industry.[1]
• Nicki Minaj said a record label once told her she was not Lauryn Hill. She said Def Jam passed on her because she wanted to mix rapping and singing, like her idol.[1]
• There is a country lane in rural France named after Lauryn Hill. The Chemin Lauryn Hill is a road in Saint Jean d'Heurs, a small rural commune in France.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.