Godfather of rap

At a funeral in New Orleans in 1901, Joe ‘King’ Oliver played a blues-drenched dirge on the trumpet. This was the new music they would soon call jazz. A century on, from the hothouse stomps of Duke Ellington to the angular doodlings of Thelonious Monk, jazz survives in the vocal inflections of rap. To its detractors, rap presents black (increasingly, white) people to the world in terms the Ku Klux Klan might use: illiterate, gold-chain-wearing, sullen, combative buffoons. (‘Life ain’t nothing but bitches and money’, harangued the Los Angeles combo N.W.A. in a reversal of Martin Luther King’s ‘black improvement’.) Yet Bob Dylan had offered an early version of rap in ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’; rap has its pedigree.  

Gil Scott-Heron, the ‘godfather of rap’, fashioned a jazz-inflected street poetry that mirrored the harshness of life in the housing projects, vacant lots and hustler turfs of black inner-city America. Born in Chicago in 1949, he spent his childhood in Jackson, West Tennessee, where segregated streetcars and unfriendly, white-owned stores were the commonplace.