Musician Gil Scott-Heron, who helped lay the groundwork for rap by fusing minimalist percussion, political expression and spoken-word poetry on songs such as The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, died last Friday aged 62.

A friend, Doris C. Nolan, who answered the telephone listed for his Manhattan recording company, said he died in the afternoon at St Luke’s Hospital after becoming sick upon returning from a European trip.

“We’re all sort of shattered,” she said.

Scott-Heron’s influence on rap was such that he sometimes was referred to as the Godfather of Rap, a title he rejected.

“If there was any individual initiative that I was responsible for it might have been that there was music in certain poems of mine, with complete progression and repeating ‘hooks’, which made them more like songs than just recitations with percussion,” he wrote in the introduction to his 1990 collection of poems, Now and Then.

He referred to his signature mix of percussion, politics and performed poetry as bluesology, or Third World music. But then he said it was simply “black music or black American music”.

“Because Black Americans are now a tremendously diverse essence of all the places we’ve come from and the music and rhythms we brought with us,” he wrote.

Nevertheless, his influence on generations of rappers has been demonstrated through sampling of his recordings by artists, including Kanye West.