The Last Holiday of Gil Scott-Heron's posthumous memoir is the Martin Luther holiday. The impetus behind several of the chapters of this book is an appreciation of Stevie Wonder who was a leading force in creating this holiday. This appreciation includes a personal account of Scott-Heron's participation in Wonder's Hotter Than July tour of 1980 and 1981 that included his Rally for Peace on the National Mall in Washington, DC on Dr. King's birthday, January 15, 1981.
The Last Holiday was evidently compiled from a number of uncollected writings in addition that included his experiences with Stevie Wonder. The first half of the book devoted to his youth up through days at Lincoln College when he crossed the threshold into professional success as a writer. His musical and performing career takes up much of the remainder of the book.
Of course, Gil Scott-Heron has a way with words making this memoir a pleasure to read. His experiences in the Jim Crow South and of his participation in its integration are fascinating and of great historical value. He was born in Chicago while his mother working there. His father was Gil Heron, a footballer of Jamaican origin who Scott-Heron described as "young, exotic and worldly," and played almost no role in his life. I was always fascinated by the the singer's unusual name, but his actual proper name was Gilbert Scott Heron, un-hyphenated. His middle name Scott was his mother's family name and a name of some stature in Jackson, Tennessee where he grew up.
The only family photograph in the book presents his grandfather, the family patriarch and local legend, his grandmother, who was the strong early influence in his life, and their children, his mother, aunts and uncle who were all strong presences in his life. He wrote movingly of his grandmother in the two part song "On Coming From A Broken Home" on his final album I'm New Here. He related that: "Womenfolk raised me, and I was full-grown before knew I came from a broken home." He lived with his grandmother in Tennessee while his mother was still earning a living in Chicago. After his grandmother's death when he was 12, he moved to the Bronx to live with his mother. He described the process of coming to know, love and respect the mother he had barely known up until then.
A teacher persuaded him to apply to the prestigious and exclusive Fieldston School. His description of the process and his time at the school is very poignant. Our Ancestry.com database offers a clue to his experience. We can see in a 1965 class picture that his fellow students are relaxed and informal; some of the boys have shaggy hair. Scott-Heron is positioned in the far-left corner of the photograph and is the only student in a coat and tie. He has a very serious, clean-cut demeanor. He did not recall his time there with fondness. Far from experiencing blatant racial discrimination, he mostly describes feeling like an outsider - "preferring to hang out with each other instead of some guy who just got there."
Ancestry.com has another surprise. The database shows that Scott-Heron lived (or was at least headquartered) in Oakland, California resident in 1994 and in San Francisco in 1995. He was a frequent performer at Kimball's East in Emeryville during that time.
The last half of the book gets into his musical career -- some of the people he crossed paths with, some of his memorable performances. He described the attraction and challenge of working in the song medium - "You have to tell stories in a limited number of words, a few lines." He also emphasized that he "always liked to give a very personal and constructive viewpoint to whatever I was writing about."
Gil Scott-Heron always defied categories. He was a musician, songwriter, poet and novelist. His music was also hard to pin down to a single genre. His recordings were spoken word, jazz, rock, rhythm and blues and soul. He expressed dismay at finding his records filed under "Miscellaneous" in a record store. When asked "What do you call your music?" he replied "Mine."
He never had a top 40 song or even a top 200 song. Eight of his singles made the Top 100 R&B charts and some of his albums sold well. But his contribution has definitely been acknowledged. He won a posthumous Grammy Lifetime Achievement award in 2012 and was inducted into the Rock Hall of Fame in 2021. He has been been given entries in all the important music biographical encyclopedias. Our Black History Bulletin, Ethnic Diversity Source and Biography in Context databases will lead the curious to a large number of articles and entries about Scott-Heron.
We have CDs of Scott-Heron's music for loan. You can also listen to several albums streaming online.
Bibliography:
Elwood, Philip, "Times are Right, and He's Right-On: Gil Scott-Heron performs with the best band he's had," San Francisco Examiner June 17, 1994.
Goffe, Leslie. "Gil Scott-Heron The Minister of Information," New African (November 2012) [In the Black History Bulletin database]
Joel Whitburn's Top R&B Singles 1942-2016 (Record Research, 2017).
Scott-Heron, Gil, The Last Holiday: A memoir (Grove Press, 2012).
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