DuranDuran
Proud Member
- Joined
- Aug 27, 2011
- Messages
- 12,883
- Points
- 113
Born in 1972 in North Philadelphia, Jill Scott grew up in the ghetto with her mom and grandmother. A deeply loved and gifted child, she learned to talk at only eight months and was reading by age four. Always the center of attention, her principal in elementary school described her as a little butterfly.
After running from Jill's abusive stepfather, mother and child moved in with Jill's grandmother, with whom she had a very close bond. After a rough but memorable childhood, Scott attended Temple University, studying secondary education. She was planning on becoming a high-school English teacher.
Unlike those of many other prominent musicians, Scott's childhood was not an especially musical one. "I didn't grow up overly influenced by music, and I didn't have a singing grandma," she told Billboard. "But in writing my poetry, I realized that words have definite sounds." It was Scott's eighth-grade English teacher, Fran Danish, who introduced her to poetry. Scott chose the poetry of Nikki Giovanni for a class assignment, thinking that Giovanni was Italian rather than African American. "When I saw that it was poetry about little black girls, I was so excited," Scott told Rolling Stone.
Soon Scott was writing poetry about the everyday materials of her life, making little songs out of things like her locker combination. That focus on detail would remain a distinctive feature of her songwriting when she ascended to stardom 15 years later. Scott also fell in love with the music of Stevie Wonder, Prince, and the all-black musical The Wiz. Hoping to become a teacher but beginning to nurture a desire to perform, Scott enrolled at Philadelphia's Temple University and majored in English. She continued to write poetry and was a fixture of Philadelphia's coffeehouses.
She approached her studies energetically, but the grim realities of American education began to wear her down. "The buildings were gray," she told the Washington Post. "Gray walls. Gray lockers. Gray floors. That's no way to teach a child. Children need stimulation. So because I would say things like that, teachers would pat me on the back and call me 'young and idealistic.'" Finally she had had enough. As she recalled in an interview with USA Today, "I quit school and my part-time job all in the same day. I decided there had to be another way to incite creativity and curiosity. My methods were not what the school district was checking for."
Shortly thereafter, a friend helped her in joining a local theater troop. After some hard work, she earned a spot on the Canadian cast of Rent, began to do poetry readings and befriended some big names in the Philly artistic community, included Jeffrey A. Townes (DJ Jazzy Jeff). It was here that Scott's musical career took off. "People were saying, Aw, you gotta check out this girl Jill Scott," Jazzy Jeff told Rolling Stone. "She wasn't even a singer then. She was a poet. I gave her a song. She said, 'I wanna write to it.'" The deconstruction of existing songs into poetic creations of her own had been a trademark of Scott's coffeehouse performances. "A couple of days later," Jazzy Jeff went on, "we drove down to the waterfront, and she sang it to me. It was 'A Long Walk.' I immediately drove her to the studio, and we cut it. And then I started calling people, like, 'Yo, I think you need to hear this.'"
Encouraged by Jazzy Jeff and Ahmir-Khalib Thompson (Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson) of the hip-hop group The Roots, Scott wrote several songs in only three days during the summer of 1999. One of them, entitled "You Got Me," was performed by Erykah Badu and The Roots, and won a Grammy for Best Rap Performance (Duo or Group). A few months later, after Jeff burned 100 demo CDs and marketed the soul singer, Jill Scott signed with the new label Hidden Beach. During this whole process and since then, she collaborated with Will Smith and Common, and worked on soundtracks for Down to Earth (2001), Wild Wild West (1999) and In Too Deep (1999)
Amazingly, she made 50 songs for her debut album and had a lot of trouble trimming it down. Finally, after much deliberation, "Who Is Jill Scott? Words & Sounds, Vol. I" was released in July 2000. It featured music that was youthful enough for the younger generation and soulful enough for those above 40.
On advice of her good friend, director Ozzie Jones, she began pursuing a career in acting in 2000. She joined a fellowship at a theater company in Philadelphia. For two years, she took small, menial, jobs in exchange for acting lessons.
In 2004, Scott expanded her resume by appearing in several episodes of season four of UPN's Girlfriends, playing Donna, a love interest to main character, William Dent. She also appeared in the Showtime movie Cavedwellers, starring Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick. She stars as Precious Ramotswe in The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, a 13-episode television series co-funded by HBO and the BBC.
Scott has established the Blues Babe Foundation, a program founded to help young minority students pay for university expenses. The Blues Babe Foundation offers financial assistance to students between the ages of sixteen to twenty-one, and targets students residing in Philadelphia, Camden, and the greater Delaware Valley. Scott donated USD$100,000 to help start the foundation. The foundation was named after Scott's grandmother, known as "Blue Babe". On the foundation's website, it defines its mission statement as one where it "seeks to provide financial support and mentoring for those students who have shown the aptitude and commitment to their education, but whose families may not have the resources to ensure completion of their undergraduate degrees".
In the spring of 2003, the Blues Babe Foundation made a donation of more than $60,000 to the graduating class of the Creative Arts School in Camden, New Jersey. Any student who maintained a 3.2 GPA received a yearly stipend for the next three years that was put toward his or her college education.
At the Essence Music Festival in July 2006, Scott spoke out about how women of color are portrayed in the lyrics of rap songs, and in rap music videos. Scott criticized the content for being "dirty, inappropriate, inadequate, unhealthy, and polluted" and urged the listening audience to "demand more".
In 2007, Scott appeared in Hounddog (as Big Mama Thornton) and in Tyler Perry's movie, Why Did I Get Married? and, in 2008, appeared as Precious Ramotswe in Anthony Minghella’s film adaption of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. Ms. Scott says she could relate much more to the character from her second film, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency.
In the film, Ms. Scott plays Precious Ramoswey (rah-MOTES-way), a rebellious Botswanan woman who goes outside the box to become a detective and help her country.
But more than the role, it was actually being in the motherland that moved Ms. Scott.
"I learned so much about acting and about myself. I love America for its reasons, but man, I love Africa," she says. "It's how people greet you while looking you in the eye, and when they give you something, it's handed to you, not at you. 'Please' and 'thank you' for everything. Manners. You don't know what respect is unless you go to Africa.
"There's no book, no picture, no nothing that comes close to experiencing Africa and its people," she says. "Everything about Africa is humbling. I'm about to cry, I miss it so. ... Whatever light is new and fresh in me, I don't want it to fade, ever."
Last edited:
