A poet who put a jazz-soul beat under the news

Gil Scott-Heron was born in Chicago in 1949 to an opera-singing mother from Mississippi and a Jamaican father who became the first black man to play for Celtic F.C. in Glasgow. His parents separated early, and he spent part of his childhood with his grandmother in Tennessee before moving to the Bronx at twelve. A scholarship took him to The Fieldston School, where he was one of five Black students, and the boldness he showed there would mark his records later.

He chose Lincoln University in Pennsylvania because Langston Hughes, his greatest literary influence, had studied there. It was at Lincoln that he met Brian Jackson. Together they fused jazz, blues and soul with lyrics about the social and political issues of the day, delivered in both rapping and melismatic singing. He called himself a “bluesologist”, his own word for a scientist concerned with the origins of the blues.

His poem “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”, delivered over a jazz-soul beat, is considered a major influence on hip-hop. The early-1970s albums Pieces of a Man and Winter in America foreshadowed later African-American genres such as hip-hop and neo soul. Tracks such as “Home Is Where The Hatred Is” and “Gun” carry that same unsparing voice. AllMusic's John Bush called him one of the most important progenitors of rap.

Scott-Heron stayed active until his death in 2011, and in 2010 he released I'm New Here, his first new album in 16 years. His memoir The Last Holiday was published after his death in January 2012, the same year he received a posthumous Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. He is on show in the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and in 2021 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the Early Influence Award, a fitting category for a writer who spoke first.