NEW YORK — Musician Gil Scott-Heron, who helped lay the groundwork for rap by fusing minimalistic percussion, political expression and spoken-word poetry, died Friday at age 62. He was born April 1, 1949, in Chicago.

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 his return 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 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.

Scott-Heron recorded the song that would make him famous, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” in the 1970s in Harlem. He followed up that recording with more than a dozen albums.