In the same year that Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel topped the album charts with Bridge over troubled waters, Gil Scott Heron recorded his debut album A New Black Poet – Small Talk at 125th and Lenox.  The difference couldn’t be more stark, both in terms of outlook and reception.

Simon and Garfunkel were at the height of their career, recording their fifth studio album and tensions were rife. The duo argued during the sessions and, despite being vocal politically at various points of their career, as a result opted not to include the only overtly political song of the recordings Cuba si Nixon no. They were repaid with an album that spawned (though I balk at its use, it seems to me that ‘spawned’ is more than appropriate here) a number of huge hit singles that meant everything and nothing to millions of people.

Gil Scott Heron, on the other hand was recording his first album – a live recording in a nightclub with the small group of David Barnes on percussion and vocals, Charlie Suanders and Eddie Knowles on percussion, and Scott Heron himself singing and playing guitar and piano. It’s as intimate as S&G’s album was polished and spacious. It’s also about as political as you’re ever going to get, while still staying on the side of art as opposed to preaching or propoganda.

The album’s most famous track is, justifiably,  The Revolution will not be televised – a template for Scott Heron’s socio-political raps that would influence so heavily african-american music later. I want, though, to recommend to you a different track. One that’s  more traditional in terms of its structure -which probably accounts for its relative obscurity – but one that packs no less powerful a punch.

The song opens with Scott Heron introduction “Who’ll pay reparations on my soul?”, his voice rich and questioning. Thereafter it’s as taut, angry, and beautifully melodic as any protest song can be. The guitar and percussion start off at breakneck speed (for an acoustic song, let’s be clear) and Scott Heron and Barnes singing push and pull each other  through America’s troubled history, chiming together repeatedly ‘but who’ll pay reparations on my soul?’.

Scott Heron has been criminally neglected, and criminally targeted in the intervening years, going in and out of jail on drug possesion charges (and apparently becoming H.I.V. positive in the process) most recently being paroled in 2007.  It would seem that there’s a clear answer to the song for him personally – the only person picking up the tab for Scott Heron has been himself. He is, according to sources on Wikipedia, back recording and writing now – something we should all be grateful for.

On a wider scale, the song remains as relevant, angry, and unanswered as ever – as we head in to an election campaign where Barak Obama’s race is something that needs to be discussed.

“What about the red man
Who met you at the coast?
You never dig sharing;
Always had to have the most.
And what about Mississippi,
The boundary of old? 
Tell me,
Who’ll pay reparations on my soul?”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4CChz4DjQE