Gil Scott-Heron is frequently called the “godfather of rap,” which is an epithet he doesn’t really care for. In 1968, when he was nineteen, he wrote a satirical spoken-word piece called “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” It was released on a very small label in 1970 and was probably heard of more than heard, but it had a following. It is the species of classic that sounds as subversive and intelligent now as it did when it was new, even though some of the references—Spiro Agnew, Natalie Wood, Roy Wilkins, Hooterville—have become dated. By the time Scott-Heron was twenty-three, he had published two novels and a book of poems and recorded three albums, each of which prospered modestly, but “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” made him famous.

Scott-Heron performing in 1998. Photograph by Monique de Latour

Scott-Heron calls himself a bluesologist. He is sixty-one, tall and scrawny, and he lives in Harlem, in a ground-floor apartment that he doesn’t often leave. It is long and narrow, and there’s a bedspread covering a sliding glass door to a patio, so no light enters, making the place seem like a monk’s cell or a cave. Once, when I thought he was away, I called to convey a message, and he answered and said, “I’m here. Where else would a caveman be but in his cave?”

Recently, I arrived at his apartment while he was watching fight films with Mimi Little, whom he calls Miss Mimi. Miss Mimi helps run his affairs and those of his company, Brouhaha Music; the living room of his apartment is the company’s office. They were watching Muhammad Ali knock down George Foreman in the eighth round of the Rumble in the Jungle, in Zaire, in 1974. Scott-Heron was wearing baggy gray sweatpants, a red-and-white-striped polo shirt, and white socks, and he stood in front of the television, lifting one foot, then the other, as if the floor were hot. When Foreman collapsed, Scott-Heron pretended to be Ali chastising him as he lay on his back. “That’s the best you can do?” he said. “I had about enough of you.”

“It’s done now,” Little said.

“I thought you could hit,” Scott-Heron said. “You hit like a baby.”

A crowd flooded the ring. “Look at these silly people,” Scott-Heron said. A large black man in a blue blazer wrapped his arms around Ali from behind and lifted him, and Ali waved his arms like a cranky baby. “Brother try to pick up Ali here. He says, ‘Put me down.’ ”

All you could see then of Ali in the blending swarm was his head and shoulders, so he looked like a bust. “Ali’s thirty-two, having been exiled to nowhere,” Scott-Heron said. “Unbelievable odds. I like to see unbelievable odds, because that’s what I’ve been facing all these years. When I feel like giving up, I like to watch this.”

The phone rang, and Little answered. She said it was Kim Jordan, his piano player. Little covered the phone and said, “She wants to know what to practice.” Scott-Heron had a performance that week in Washington, D.C. He kept his eyes on the screen. “ ‘Lady Day and John Coltrane,’ key of A,” he said. “ ‘I Call It Morning,’ ‘Give Her a Call.’ ”

“He’ll give you a call,” Little said.

“No, that’s the name of the song, ‘Give Her a Call,’ ” Scott-Heron said.

Little hung up, and Scott-Heron sat down on the couch, facing the screen. The couch was brown, with so many little black burn circles that they seemed worked into the fabric’s design. A few extension cords crossed a rug on the floor, and lying at his feet among them was a propane torch. Taped to the wall facing him was a piece of paper on which he had written, in capital letters, with a Sharpie, “NOTHING NICE TO TALK ABOUT? NOTHING GOOD TO SAY? NO YUKS? NO SMILES? THEN SHUT UP. THE MNGMT.” On the shelf of a cabinet were some books, and some DVDs, which he buys at a video store next door to the Apollo Theatre, on 125th Street. He especially likes shows and movies and cartoons from his childhood, such as “Top Cat” and “Rocky and Bullwinkle” and “Underdog.” “Your life has to consist of more than ‘Black people should unite,’ ” he said. “You hope they do, but not twenty-four hours a day. If you aren’t having no fun, die, because you’re running a worthless program, far as I’m concerned.”

Little said that she was leaving to run errands. Staples was having a two-to-a-customer sale of something she needed a quantity of. “I’m going back two or three times,” she said. “I have a disguise, and I know where four Staples are.”

When she left, Scott-Heron seemed briefly at a loss, then he said, “We should listen to some music.” He put on a song of his from years ago called “Racetrack in France,” which is about a festival he played in the seventies. “I don’t feel as comfortable playing something of somebody else’s,” he said shyly. “I can’t say how the good parts got put together.”

Sometimes when I spoke to people who used to know Scott-Heron, they told me that they preferred to remember him as he had been. They meant before he had begun avidly smoking crack, which is a withering drug. As a young man, he had a long, narrow, slightly curved face, which seemed framed by hair that bloomed above his forehead like a hedge. The expression in his eyes was baleful, aloof, and slightly suspicious. He was thin then, but now he seems strung together from wires and sinews—he looks like bones wearing clothes. He is bald on top, and his hair, which is like cotton candy, sticks out in several directions. His cheeks are sunken and deeply lined. Dismayed by his appearance, he doesn’t like to look in mirrors. He likes to sit on the floor, with his legs crossed and his propane torch within reach, his cigarettes and something to drink or eat beside him. Nearly his entire diet consists of fruit and juice. Crack makes a user anxious and uncomfortable and, trying to relieve the tension, Scott-Heron would sometimes lean to one side or reach one hand across himself to grab his opposite ankle, then perhaps lean an elbow on one knee, then maybe press the soles of his feet together, so that he looked like a swami.

Scott-Heron’s voice has always been more of a declaimer’s voice than a singer’s voice—when he was young, he sounded like a writer singing. In 1971, he recorded a second version of “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” and the bassist Ron Carter, who played on it, told me, “He wasn’t a great singer, but, with that voice, if he had whispered it would have been dynamic. It was a voice like you would have for Shakespeare.” Smoking cigarettes erodes a singer’s subtlety and range, and Scott-Heron has smoked for decades, making his voice less versatile but raspier and even more idiosyncratic.

Scott-Heron says that he writes songs and records them all the time, but he has made only two albums since 1982. (Between 1970 and 1982, he made thirteen.) He writes at night, when it is quiet, but only, he says, when the spirits bring him a line or a melody.

Recently, though, Scott-Heron has returned to prominence, having released an album called “I’m New Here,” which has brought him a new, younger audience. It is the result of the British hip-hop producer Richard Russell’s sending him a letter in 2005 asking if he wanted to make a record. As a teen-ager in London in the nineteen-eighties, Russell had seen Scott-Heron perform. He also knew his music from clubs that played rare groove, the British term for obscure, older soul, funk, and Latin records, which hip-hop musicians covet for samples.

Scott-Heron and Russell met in 2006, at Rikers Island, where Scott-Heron was being held for a parole violation. Since 2001, he has been convicted twice of cocaine possession. The first time, he was arrested by cops who said that they saw him shake the hand of a man on a street corner and accept a small piece of tinfoil. The second time, cocaine that he had hidden in the lining of his bag showed up on an airport X-ray. A guard read on Russell’s paperwork the name of the prisoner he had come to see and said, “Don’t tell me it’s the Gil Scott-Heron.”

“I’m New Here” is a reverent and intimate record, almost more field work than entertainment—a collage partly sung and partly talked, and made largely from fragments of Scott-Heron’s poetry, handled here in a voguish manner. It presents a notional version of Scott-Heron, which is Scott-Heron as hip-hop practitioner.

Scott-Heron recorded the songs and his poems, and Russell added the hip-hop tracks that accompany them. “This is Richard’s CD,” Scott-Heron says. “My only knowledge when I got to the studio was how he seemed to have wanted this for a long time. You’re in a position to have somebody do something that they really want to do, and it was not something that would hurt me or damage me—why not? All the dreams you show up in are not your own.”

“I’m New Here” is twenty-eight minutes long and has fifteen tracks, four of which are songs, one of which Scott-Heron wrote. Russell left the microphone on between takes and during discussions, and so he collected asides and observations, which he presents as interludes.

The record starts and ends with excerpts from a poem written thirty years ago, called “Coming from a Broken Home,” which includes the lines “Womenfolk raised me and I was full grown / before I knew I came from a broken home.” Russell embedded the reading in a sample from a Kanye West song, a hip-hop self-reference, since Kanye West had already sampled Scott-Heron.

The first song, “Me and the Devil,” by Robert Johnson, is an account of a man who hears the Devil knocking early in the morning on his door. In Johnson’s version, delivered in his clear, glottal voice, the character is a violent reprobate. Scott-Heron portrays him as boastful, lunatic, and malignant—proud to be acknowledged by someone capable of appreciating the true cast of his soul. He amended one of the words, though. “I have this philosophy from further back in my family about beating women—that’s what this song is about,” he says. “ ‘Me and the Devil walking side by side, I’m going to beat my woman until I’m satisfied.’ That’s why the Devil’s coming to get him, that’s why he’s going to Hell, because he’s a hitter, he beats his woman. And that’s why he’s expecting him, because he’s resolved. I’m not hooked up that way, so I sing, ‘I’m going to see my woman.’ The song’s like a confession.” (Even so, Scott-Heron pleaded guilty in 1999 to assaulting a woman named Monique de Latour, who said that he threw a drafting table at her and cut her hand.)

The song Scott-Heron wrote, “New York Is Killing Me,” is a blues sung against a spare background of syncopated handclaps and looped fragments. His voice is weary and raw. “The doctors don’t know, but New York is killing me,” he sings. “Bunch of doctors come around, they don’t know, that New York is killing me / I need to go home and take it slow down in Jackson, Tennessee.”

More than one romance threads itself through “I’m New Here”—the most prominent of which is a younger man’s veneration of a charismatic elder. Aside from liking Scott-Heron’s music, Russell regards him as “genuinely philosophical,” he told me. “He’s not hung up on time or ordinary circumstances, and I’ve never come across anyone as interesting to talk to.” Russell has said that a difficulty of working with Scott-Heron was that sometimes he wouldn’t show up. A philosopher might miss appointments, but so might someone with a propane torch in his apartment, even if he is a philosopher.

There is a gentleness in Scott-Heron’s nature that suggests his childhood among the stern, intelligent women he pays homage to in “Coming from a Broken Home.” His father, Gilbert Heron, who died in 2008, and whom he never much knew, was a soccer player who grew up in Jamaica. In Chicago, Gilbert met Scott-Heron’s mother, Robert Scott, who was named for her father and called Bobbie. “It was after the war, working for Western Electric,” Scott-Heron told me. “He also played for the Chicago Maroons, or something like that. A Scottish team came through, and he scored on them, which was not what they had come for. They was all white. He went to Scotland, and the legend goes he scored the day he arrived. He was dubbed the Black Arrow, and played professionally for three more years.”

Scott-Heron’s parents separated when he was two years old, and while his mother went to Puerto Rico to teach English he lived with his grandmother in Jackson. “My grandmother was dead serious,” he said one day, sitting on his couch. “Her sense of humor was a secret. She started me playing the piano. There was a funeral parlor next door to our house, and they had this old piano that they used for wakes and funerals, and they were getting ready to take it to the junk yard. She wanted me to play hymns for the ladies’ sewing circle that met every Thursday, and she bought the piano for six dollars, and she paid a lady up the street five or ten cents a lesson to teach me to play four hymns, ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus,’ ‘Rock of Ages,’ ‘The Old Rugged Cross,’ and I can’t think of the other one. I was eight years old, and I had started to listen to WDIA in Memphis, and they would play the blues. When I was practicing, I would have to mix them, because my grandmother was not big on the blues. When she was out in the yard, I can play what I want, but if she’s in the house I got to mix John Lee Hooker with ‘Rock of Ages.’ ”

The phone rang, but he ignored it. “I found my grandmother dead,” he went on. “It shook me up. I got up to make her breakfast, and I knew it was strange that she wasn’t stirring. I went in to wake her, and she was laying in rigor mortis”—he leaned back and held his legs and arms stiff—“and I’m done. I called next door, and the kid picked up the phone, and I was so wild, he dropped it. I went outside and saw the woman from the house going to work, and she came and took over. I was twelve.”

With his mother and her brother, Scott-Heron moved to an apartment in the Bronx, and his mother went to work for the city housing authority. Before long, his uncle moved out, and his mother couldn’t afford the rent, so she put her name on a list for an apartment in a project in Chelsea, in Manhattan. “Black people didn’t want to live in Chelsea, but we just wanted to go somewhere,” Scott-Heron said. “We started in ’65. It was eighty-five per cent Puerto Rican, fifteen per cent white, and me.”

The young woman who taught Scott-Heron English in his sophomore year at DeWitt Clinton High School had gone to a private school called the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, which is in Riverdale, a prosperous section of the Bronx. “She was assigning all these books that didn’t mean anything, like ‘A Separate Peace,’ ” Scott-Heron said. “Finally, she asked me a question, and I said, ‘Look, can I get out of here? This just sucks.’ I told her—I figured she knew—‘I can write better than that. I been sitting here writing better than that.’ I handed her something from my notebook, and she gave it to the head of the department at Fieldston. They asked me would I come to a meeting. I said I might walk out, but we met at the Howard Johnson across from the Bronx Zoo, and I got a hamburger and a strawberry shake out of it, while they asked me would I take a test to see if I could go to their school.”