AT A GLANCE

Scott-Heron, Gil

3 articles on Scott-Heron, Gil

• Scott-Heron, Gil

  Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century

  Word Count: 912      Includes:  Bibliography

  (b. 1 April 1949), singer, songwriter, and writer. Scott-Heron has been an influential contributor to the musical genre of rap. He was born in Chicago to Bobbi Scott-Heron and Giles “Gil” Heron, who played professionally for the Glasgow Celtic Football Club. His grandmother Lillie Scott raised him in Jackson, Tennessee, where he was introduced to the harsh reality of color prejudice. At age thirteen, when his grandmother died, he moved to the Bronx, New York, to live with his mother, where he attended DeWitt Clinton High School and the Fieldston School. By age twenty-three he had written two novels, The Vulture (1970) and The Nigger Factory (1972). He attended Lincoln University before earning a master's degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University. While at Lincoln ...
  Read full article

• Scott-Heron, Gil

  Source: African American National Biography

  Word Count: 1306      Includes:  Obituary: | Further Reading

  (1 Apr. 1949–27 May 2011), poet, singer, songwriter, was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Bobbie Scott, a librarian, and Giles “Gil” Heron, a professional soccer player. Scott-Heron was an adult when he met his father, a member both of Glasgow's Celtic Football Club and the Canadian Air Force. When his parents divorced, Scott-Heron moved to Jackson, Tennessee, to live with his grandmother. Chosen as one of three black children set to integrate an elementary school in Jackson, Scott-Heron endured brutal racism. Displeased, his grandmother sent him to join his mother in New York, where he enrolled in a school in the Bronx. He began playing the piano and writing mysteries at an early age. While attending DeWitt Clinton High School, he won a scholarship to the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, a ...
  Read full article

• Scott-Heron, Gil

  Source: Grove Music Online

  Word Count: 264     

  (b. Chicago, 1 April, 1949). American poet and musician. He grew up in the Bronx and first found fame with poetry highlighting the plight of black Americans and the inadequacies and inequalities of life in the early 1970s. He was at the forefront of the black arts movement with early raps including The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Sex Education Ghetto Style and The Get Out of the Ghetto Blues. These became even more well known when he recited them for a début album, Small Talk at 125th and Lenox (Flying Dutchman, 1970). 1970s ‘blaxploitation’ was defined by this and other of his works, including The Bottle, Angel Dust, Winter In America and the album Pieces of a Man(Flying Dutchman 1971) for which he collaborated for the first time with the pianist Brian Jackson. By the 1980s, his politics diversified ...
  Read full article