Gil Scott-Heron Biography
Gil Scott-Heron applied R&B grooves and a jazz sensibility to his topical street poetry, resulting in a long series of influential albums whose sociopolitical insight and uncompromising humanism established Scott-Heron as a major voice. The artist’s combination of spoken-word lyrics and raw urban funk also helped to lay the groundwork for rap and hip-hop.
Scott-Heron was born in Chicago to a librarian mother who also sang, and a Jamaican soccer player father who had been the first black player to join Glasgow’s Celtic Football club. His parents divorced when he was a child, and he was sent to live with his grandmother in Tennessee, where he learned some early lessons about racism when he became one of three children chosen to integrate a local elementary school. When he was 13, Scott-Heron went to live with his mother in the Bronx, where he began writing about his experiences, publishing his first novel, The Vulture, in 1970. During a brief period attending Pennsylvania’s Lincoln University, he met keyboardist Brian Jackson, who would later become Scott-Heron’s chief musical collaborator.
Legendary jazz producer Bob Thiele encouraged Scott-Heron to set his poetry to music, and signed him to his Flying Dutchman label. Flying Dutchman released his first three LPs, beginning with 1970’s Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, on which Scott-Heron read pieces from his book of the same name, with sparse percussive accompaniment; that album introduced the instant classic “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” Scott-Heron demonstrated increased musical and lyrical assurance on the subsequent Pieces of a Man and Free Will, which featured backup from such noted jazz players as Ron Carter, Hubert Laws and Bernard Purdie. In 1972, his composition “Home is Where The Hatred Is” became a hit for veteran jazz/R&B diva Esther Phillips.
After becoming the first artist signed to the new Arista label in 1975, Scott-Heron moved in a more R&B/funk-oriented direction on such releases as From South Africa to South Carolina and First Minute of a New Day, which gave co-billing to Brian Jackson. His Arista albums saw Scott-Heron winning mainstream chart success; the anti-apartheid anthem “Johannesburg” reach the R&B Top 30, while “The Bottle” and “Angel Dust,” both of which examined substance abuse in the African-American community, both reached Number 15 on the R&B charts.
In 1979, Scott-Heron performed alongside Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt at the historic No Nukes concerts at Madison Square Garden, and appears in the concert film No Nukes performing his anti-nuclear-power composition “We Almost Lost Detroit.” Brian Jackson left the Midnight Band in the late ’70s, and Scott-Heron subsequently worked with seasoned R&B/funk producers Malcolm Cecil and Nile Rodgers. In the ’80s, Scott-Heron took aim at then-president Ronald Reagan on the R&B hits “B Movie” and “Re-Ron,” and in 1985 he contributed a new song to the anti-apartheid Sun City benefit album. In the ’90s, as he received increasing credit for his influence on the birth of rap, Scott-Heron was vocal in calling upon hip-hop artists to emphasize social consciousness rather than self-aggrandizing posturing.
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