“But there’s a whole industry devoted to saying it doesn’t matter for Hendrix.” “Nobody would say that race doesn’t matter for Muddy Waters,” says Wells, an English professor at Indiana University Southeast. Wells said he found that odd given Hendrix’s sound was steeped in the blues tradition of black guitarists such as B.B. They rarely mentioned his race, or even said that his music transcended race. Wells first noticed this pattern when he examined how white heavy metal musicians and fans described Hendrix. Yet he’s still seen by many as a musical genius who just happened to be black instead of a man whose genius was inseparable from his race, says Jeremy Wells, author of “Blackness Scuzed: Jimi Hendrix’s Invisible Legacy in Heavy Metal.” There are signs today that more fans are starting to appreciate how Hendrix’s race shaped his life and sound. Music critics and biographers say Hendrix also was frustrated by legions of white fans who only saw him as a racial stereotype – a hypersexual black man who was high all the time – instead of a serious musician. Hendrix traveled to Harlem because he was trying to connect with blacks who had dismissed him as a musical Uncle Tom: a black man playing white man’s music. Yet no film has explored another twist in Hendrix’s journey: How black and white audiences misunderstood the importance of Hendrix’s race, both to the man and to his music. “Jimi: All Is by My Side” shows how Hendrix left New York for London to become a star. People heckled him.”Ī new film focusing on a more triumphant period in Hendrix’s life is rekindling interest in the guitar icon. Cross, who recounts the episode in his biography of Hendrix, “Room Full of Mirrors.” “He was jeered. Hendrix gamely played on while much of the crowd melted away. Someone threw a bottle at him that shattered against a speaker eggs splattered on the stage. Hendrix’s homecoming, though, was almost ruined as soon as he stepped onstage. He held a concert for an African-American audience in Harlem, a place he once called home. Two weeks after closing Woodstock with his reinvention of “The Star Spangled Banner,” Jimi Hendrix decided to offer a free concert for a group he called “my people.”
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