Gil Scott-Heron (1949-2011) believed in what he called “the spirits.” He wasn’t a religious man in conventional terms, but he believed in forces that provided inspiration and that helped people become their true, highest selves. “If you’re supposed to be doing something, the spirits will come and help you,” he told Alec Wilkinson of the New Yorker. “They have helped me out with lines I shouldn’t have known, chords I shouldn’t have known. Every once in a while I get lines from somewhere, and I think, I better write this down.”

Fortunately, he wrote down enough of those lines – and delivered them compellingly in a voice rich with emotional power – to amass an extraordinary body of work that includes albums, novels, and collections of poetry. His deeply textured music, much of it composed by his longtime collaborator Brian Jackson – draws on blues, jazz, soul, and R&B, all of which underlay his sung and spoken-word narratives of Black lives enmeshed in trying times. His songs – masterpieces like “Home Is Where the Hatred Is,” “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” “The Bottle,” “We Almost Lost Detroit,” and “Winter in America” – are clear-eyed and unsentimental, pointed and sardonic, but never without hope.