Gil Scott-Heron

• 1. Introduction

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  Gil Scott-Heron was born on the 1st of April, 1949, in Chicago, and by the time he died on the 27th of May, 2011, he had changed American music in ways that are still being counted. He is remembered as a poet, a singer, a novelist, and a social critic who fused jazz, blues, and soul with raw political verse. A single poem, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised", delivered over a jazz-soul beat, is now considered a major influence on hip hop music. Critics have called him one of the most important progenitors of rap, and Eminem said simply: "He influenced all of hip-hop." Yet Scott-Heron himself remained ambivalent about that legacy. He preferred to call himself a "bluesologist" - his own word for "a scientist who is concerned with the origin of the blues." He was wary of credit he never quite asked for, and he spent his life resisting easy labels. How did a boy from Chicago end up shaping the sound of the late twentieth century? And what did it cost him to get there?

• 2. Roots and Formation

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  Scott-Heron's father, Gil Heron, nicknamed "The Black Arrow", was a Jamaican footballer who became the first black man to play for Celtic F.C. in Glasgow, Scotland, in the 1950s. His mother, Bobbie Scott, was an opera singer who performed with the Oratorio Society of New York. The family broke apart early, and young Gil was sent to live with his maternal grandmother, Lillie Scott, in Jackson, Tennessee. When Scott-Heron was 12, Lillie died, and he went back north to live with his mother in The Bronx.

  He enrolled at DeWitt Clinton High School but earned a full scholarship to The Fieldston School after impressing the head of the English department with his writing. As one of five Black students at a prestigious institution, he faced both alienation and a sharp socioeconomic divide. During his admissions interview, an administrator asked how he would feel if he saw a classmate pass in a limousine while he was walking up from the subway. Scott-Heron answered: "Same way as you. Y'all can't afford no limousine. How do you feel?" That intractable boldness would become one of the defining qualities of his later work.

  He chose Lincoln University in Oxford, Pennsylvania, specifically because Langston Hughes, his most important literary influence, had attended there. At Lincoln he met Brian Jackson, with whom he would make some of the most significant recordings of the 1970s. The two formed a band called Black & Blues. Scott-Heron also took a year away from Lincoln to write two novels, The Vulture and The Nigger Factory, and was deeply shaped by the Black Arts Movement. When The Last Poets performed at Lincoln in 1969, Scott-Heron approached Abiodun Oyewole afterward and asked: "Listen, can I start a group like you guys?" The Vulture was published by the World Publishing Company in 1970 to positive reviews.

• 3. The Recording Years

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  Scott-Heron launched his recording career with the LP Small Talk at 125th and Lenox in 1970, produced by Bob Thiele of Flying Dutchman Records. The album's 14 tracks addressed the superficiality of television, mass consumerism, and the hypocrisy of would-be black revolutionaries. Among its tracks was the spoken-word poem "Whitey on the Moon". In the liner notes, Scott-Heron named his influences: Richie Havens, John Coltrane, Otis Redding, Jose Feliciano, Billie Holiday, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Huey Newton, Nina Simone, and Brian Jackson.

  His 1971 album Pieces of a Man moved toward more conventional song structures, with Jackson and a cast that included Ron Carter on bass, drummer Bernard "Pretty" Purdie, and Hubert Laws on flute and saxophone. Carter later offered a precise assessment of Scott-Heron's voice: "He wasn't a great singer, but, with that voice, if he had whispered it would have been dynamic. It was a voice like you would have for Shakespeare."

  The 1974 collaboration Winter in America, recorded with Bob Adams on drums and Danny Bowens on bass, was widely regarded by critics as the two musicians' most artistically worthwhile effort. A year later came the single "Johannesburg", a rallying cry against apartheid in South Africa. Scott-Heron's song "We Almost Lost Detroit" appeared on the No Nukes album in 1979, following his performance at the No Nukes concerts at Madison Square Garden, which were organized to protest nuclear energy after the Three Mile Island accident. His single "Angel Dust" peaked at No. 15 on the R&B charts in 1978. Arista Records dropped him in 1985, and he stopped recording, though he kept touring.

• 4. Political Voice

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  In 1975, Scott-Heron released "Johannesburg" as a single, a direct attack on apartheid South Africa at a moment when many Western artists were still performing there. A decade later, in 1985, he contributed to the Artists United Against Apartheid album Sun City. He helped compose and sang on "Let Me See Your I.D.", which included the line: "The first time I heard there was trouble in the Middle East, I thought they were talking about Pittsburgh." The song drew a direct parallel between American racial inequality and the apartheid system.

  Scott-Heron was a frequent critic of President Ronald Reagan, and his 1981 recording "B-Movie" - a pointed satirical attack on Reagan's presidency - reached No. 49 on the R&B charts. In 2010, when he was booked to perform in Tel Aviv, Israel, pro-Palestinian activists wrote to him, arguing that performing there would be "the equivalent to having performed in Sun City during South Africa's apartheid era." Scott-Heron canceled the performance.

  His 1993 track "Message to the Messengers", on the album Spirits, was a direct address to the new generation of rap artists. He urged them to speak for change rather than to posture, to be more articulate and artistic. In a 1993 interview, he said of hip hop: "They need to study music. I played in several bands before I began my career as a poet. There's a big difference between putting words over some music, and blending those same words into the music." Scott-Heron was a man who measured his words, and he measured everyone else's too.

• 5. Prison, Return, and I'm New Here

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  In 2001, Scott-Heron was sentenced to one to three years imprisonment in a New York State prison for possession of cocaine. He appeared on the Blazing Arrow album by Blackalicious while briefly out of jail in 2002, and was released on parole in 2003. He was arrested again in October 2003, during the editing of the BBC documentary Gil Scott-Heron: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, and received a six-month sentence. On the 5th of July, 2006, he was sentenced to two to four years for violating a plea deal by leaving a drug rehabilitation center; he claimed the clinic had refused to supply him with HIV medication. Originally set to serve until the 13th of July, 2009, he was paroled on the 23rd of May, 2007.

  After his release, he resumed performing with a show at SOB's restaurant and nightclub in New York on the 13th of September, 2007. From the stage, he announced that he and his musicians were working on a new album and that he had resumed writing The Last Holiday, a memoir about Stevie Wonder's campaign to have the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. declared a federally recognized holiday.

  I'm New Here was released on the 9th of February, 2010, on XL Recordings, produced by label owner Richard Russell. It was Scott-Heron's first studio album in 16 years. The majority of the recording was done over the 12 months before release at Clinton Studios in New York, with engineer Lawson White. The album runs 28 minutes across 15 tracks, with casual asides from recording sessions woven in as interludes. Russell produced; Scott-Heron described himself as a passenger: "This is Richard's CD. All the dreams you show up in are not your own." A reviewer for NPR wrote: "He's made a record not without hope but which doesn't come with any easy or comforting answers." On I'm New Here, Scott-Heron sampled Kanye West's 2007 single "Flashing Lights" - a late gesture of reciprocity, given how heavily West had drawn on his own catalogue.

• 6. Legacy and Afterlife

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  Scott-Heron died on the 27th of May, 2011, in New York City, after a trip to Europe. His memorial service was held at Riverside Church in New York City on the 2nd of June, 2011, where Kanye West performed "Lost in the World" and "Who Will Survive in America". The studio version of West's "Who Will Survive in America" features a spoken-word excerpt by Scott-Heron, drawn from his own work.

  Chuck D of Public Enemy wrote on Twitter: "RIP GSH...and we do what we do and how we do because of you." Richard Russell, who produced I'm New Here, called him "a father figure of sorts to me." Scott-Heron's UK publisher Jamie Byng called him "one of the most inspiring people I've ever met."

  His memoir The Last Holiday was published in January 2012. Reviewing it for the Los Angeles Times, professor Lynell George wrote that it "is as much about his life as it is about context, the theater of late 20th century America - from Jim Crow to the Reagan '80s and from Beale Street to 57th Street."

  Scott-Heron received a posthumous Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012, nominated by Charlotte Fox of the Washington, D.C. chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, with a letter of support from Bill Withers. In 2021, he was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the Early Influence Award. He is buried at Kensico Cemetery in Westchester County, New York. Rumal Rackley, who Scott-Heron had introduced from the stage as his son, donated material to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened on the 24th of September, 2016, on the National Mall - ensuring that the bluesologist's archive found a permanent home.