Winter in America - Legacy and Influence

Legacy and Influence

Winter in America has been recognized by music writers as one of the prominent examples of early rap, along with the early work of The Watts Prophets and The Last Poets. "The Bottle" was covered by latin soul musician Joe Bataan for his album Afrofilipino (1975). Recordings featured on the album, along with other Scott-Heron/Jackson compositions, were sampled by hip hop artists, including "The Bottle" on the Jungle Brothers' "Black Is Black". This further expanded Scott-Heron's legacy as one of the progenitors of hip hop. The diverse sound and mellow instrumentation featured on the album, referred to by Scott-Heron as bluesology, later inspired neo soul artists in the 1990s and helped solidify Scott-Heron's and Jackson's legacy in the genre. On Jackson's legacy, All About Jazz described him as "one of the early architects of the neo-soul", while citing his early work with Scott-Heron as "an inspirational and musical Rosetta stone for the neo-soul movement". Pierre Jean-Critin of the French music magazine Vibrations wrote of Scott-Heron and the album, stating "As an artist who conceives his albums as newspapers and similar testimonies, Gil Scott-Heron is one of America's finest observers and commentators of social reality as well as being one of the most creative and influential figures in African-American music, and this landmark album announced his arrival."

The album also marked the transition of Scott-Heron from beat poet to singer-songwriter with a full-scale band. He further developed this melodic approach with his following work with Brian Jackson, The First Minute of a New Day (1975) and From South Africa to South Carolina (1976). While the album did not have a direct impact on the black music scene at the time, it proved to become one of the Strata-East label's most successful LP releases, in terms of sales and appeal to their target audience. While serving as Scott-Heron's and Jackson's only album for the independent label, Winter in America helped Strata-East Records achieve considerable notability among other New York City distributors of soul and jazz music during the 1970s, while the latter genre had been viewed by many jazz purists to be in a period of creative confusion and decline. In describing the label and its issued musical works, Dream magazine's Kevin Moist stated "The diversity and experimentation of the music, plus the great quality of many of those experiments, make it seem like more like a creative golden age in which the dominant idea was new ideas mixing and blending cultural styles and artistic genres or pushing existing styles into new extremes." According to Nick Dedina of Rhapsody, Winter in America had impact elsewhere, stating "this deeply felt (and sometimes deeply funky) album helped break the pioneer of protest jazz-soul and rap to the general public with hit single 'The Bottle'".

The album was re-released with previously unreleased bonus material by Scott-Heron's Rumal-Gia label in 1998, following a reissue project headed by Scott-Heron after he had received ownership of his 1970s recordings. The record's significance and influence in music has led to much retrospective favor of it among music writers and critics, as shown in Winter's rankings in several "best of" publication polls. Winter in America was ranked number 67 on New Nation's June 2004 list of The Top 100 Black Albums. The album was also listed in the music reference book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die (2006). "The Bottle" was later ranked number 92 on NME magazine's list of The Top 150 Singles of All-Time and was included in Q magazine's 1010 Songs You Must Own! publication. The title track was included on music writer Bruce Pollock's 2005 list of The 7,500 Most Important Songs of 1944-2000, and it was ranked number 82 on Blow Up's list of 100 Songs to Remember.