Gil Scott-Heron was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1949, when racial discrimination was at its worst, and blacks were starting to fight back for equal rights in America. Scott-Heron’s mother, Bobbie, was an opera singer, and his father, Gil, was a Jamaican football player, who was also the first black man to play for the Celtic Football Club. When Scott-Heron’s parents separated, he was sent to live with his grandmother in Jackson, Tennessee where schools were segregated. When he was twelve-years-old, his grandmother died, and he went to live with his mother in the Bronx. His childhood was proven to be the leading factor to his success in music. Poetry and music was an outlet for him, which he started writing before his teenage years. By the time he was thirteen-years old he had written his first volume of poetry. Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X, were big…show more content… Some of the issues that inspired his music were related to racism, alcohol abuse, the government, or the economy. In 1974, Scott-Heron wrote, The Bottle, a piece that illustrates alcoholism and its power during this era. In The Bottle, a little black boy runs away from home because his father has a bad alcohol problem. This is a huge issue because it not only has major health effects on the alcoholic, but it has an impact on the people around them. People are willing to do anything to get alcohol if they want it bad enough. One line that stood out to me in this piece is, “People living in the bottle.” It shows how much a bottle of alcohol can change a person’s life because it gets to the point where the person is always drunk and can not live without the alcohol. Scott-Heron must have had a family member, or known someone personally who was suffering from alcoholism because the way he used spoken word to get across his message, and the tone in his voice showed that he was very passionate about the