On 30 October 2021, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame held its induction ceremony at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse in Cleveland, the home arena of the Cleveland Cavaliers. Tina Turner, Carole King, the Foo Fighters and JAY-Z went in that night.
Three more names were honoured with the Early Influence Award: the electronic group Kraftwerk, the Delta blues singer Charley Patton, and the poet, singer and pianist Gil Scott-Heron.
Scott-Heron had been dead for ten years. Nearly a decade earlier, the Recording Academy had given him a Lifetime Achievement Grammy, and that came too late as well.
What he did live to see was a comeback. In February 2010 he released I’m New Here, his first album in 16 years, made with a London record boss who had gone to visit him in a New York jail. Fifteen months later he was gone.
From Lenox Avenue to “The Bottle”
By then his reputation rested on records made 40 years earlier. Small Talk at 125th and Lenox (1970) was his first LP, a set of poems performed live with percussion, produced by Bob Thiele for Flying Dutchman.
A year later came Pieces of a Man, recorded in New York on 19 and 20 April 1971 with Ron Carter on bass, Bernard “Pretty” Purdie on drums, Hubert Laws on flute and saxophone, and Brian Jackson on piano. Track one was the studio version of “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”.
Jackson became his closest collaborator. Their Winter in America came out on the musician-run label Strata-East in May 1974, cut on an eight-track machine in Silver Spring, Maryland, because they couldn’t afford 16 tracks. Its single, “The Bottle”, reached No. 15 on Billboard’s R&B chart.
The long silence after Spirits
The records slowed down in the 1980s. Spirits, on TVT in 1994, was the last new studio album for 16 years.
The 2000s were spent in and out of the courts. A cocaine conviction in 2001 sent him to a New York State prison for up to three years, and a 2003 arrest over a crack pipe added another six months.
In July 2006 a judge sent him back to prison for two to four years after he walked out of the rehab clinic his plea deal required. His explanation was that the clinic wouldn’t give him his HIV medication. Parole came in May 2007.
The man from XL who went to Rikers
Richard Russell, who ran the London label XL Recordings, had been a fan since his teens, and had tried to reach Scott-Heron after seeing him play at Dingwalls in London. In 2005 he decided to ask him to make a new album. The filmmaker Don Letts put him in touch with the publisher Jamie Byng, who passed on an introduction.
Russell wrote to Scott-Heron setting out his ideas. A friend of Scott-Heron’s called back to say he would meet, and on 14 June 2006 Russell went to see him at Rikers Island, the New York jail, as he later told the Irish Times. Scott-Heron told The Fader that Russell came about six months into his sentence, before he had been moved upstate.
The first recording session came in January 2008, after his release on parole. The last track they cut, “New York Is Killing Me”, was recorded in September 2009.
Sixteen years later: I’m New Here
I’m New Here came out on XL on 8 February 2010 in Britain and a day later in the US. It runs just over 28 minutes, across 15 tracks, with short spoken asides between the songs.
Russell wrapped the voice, now deep and worn, in sparse electronic beats and loops. The covers were the surprises. The title track was written by Bill Callahan and first recorded under his name Smog, an indie-folk song nobody would have expected him to choose.
Robert Johnson’s “Me and the Devil” became the first single, and Brook Benton’s “I’ll Take Care of You”, a 1959 single for Bobby “Blue” Bland on Duke, became a slow, bare lament.
Russell told NPR that it simply struck him that Scott-Heron needed to be heard.
Jamie xx, Drake and a remix album
In February 2011, XL released We’re New Here, a full remix of the album by Jamie xx of the London band The xx. Russell’s production had itself taken cues from The xx’s 2009 debut.
The remix of “I’ll Take Care of U” travelled furthest. Drake and Rihanna reworked it into “Take Care”, the title track of Drake’s 2011 album, which put Scott-Heron’s voice in front of a generation that had never heard “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”. Hip-hop had been borrowing from jazz records for decades; this time it was borrowing from his newest record.
Riverside Church, and the honours that followed
Scott-Heron fell ill after returning from a trip to Europe and died at St. Luke’s Hospital in New York on 27 May 2011, aged 62.
At his memorial at Riverside Church in Harlem on 2 June, Kanye West made a surprise appearance and closed the service with “Lost in the World” and “Who Will Survive in America”, the last two tracks of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, which carry Scott-Heron’s own spoken voice.
In December 2011 the Recording Academy named him for a Lifetime Achievement Award alongside Diana Ross, George Jones, Glen Campbell, the Allman Brothers Band, Antonio Carlos Jobim and the Memphis Horns. The announcement credited his mix of jazz, blues and spoken word with helping to shape rap. A decade later the Rock Hall made the same case with its Early Influence Award.
He never liked being called “the godfather of rap”. His own term, according to the Poetry Foundation, was “bluesologist”: someone who studies where the blues came from.
A comeback just in time
Gil Scott-Heron released his first album in 16 years in February 2010, after Richard Russell of XL Recordings visited him at Rikers Island in June 2006.
Jamie xx remixed it as We’re New Here, and a track from that remix became the basis of Drake’s “Take Care”. Scott-Heron died on 27 May 2011, aged 62. His Lifetime Achievement Grammy followed in 2012 and his Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Early Influence Award in 2021.
To hear the whole arc, start with Pieces of a Man for the 1971 band with Ron Carter and Purdie, then Winter in America for Brian Jackson’s flute and keyboards on “The Bottle”.
Then play I’m New Here straight through; at 28 minutes it rewards a single sitting. Finish with We’re New Here to hear the same voice rebuilt for the dancefloor.
For more on Scott-Heron, read how his father, Gil Heron, made Celtic F.C. history long before his son made a record. And for the 1970s scene around Winter in America, see our guide to pioneering jazz-funk musicians and albums.
Note: As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
Which do you reach for first: the 1971 Pieces of a Man, or the 2010 I’m New Here?
