Jimi Hendrix - Genealogy and Childhood

Genealogy and Childhood

Jimi Hendrix was of a mixed geneaology that included African American, Irish, and Cherokee ancestors. His paternal great grandmother, Zenora, was a full-blooded Cherokee from Georgia who married an Irishman named Moore. In 1883, they had a daughter whom they named Zenora "Nora" Rose Moore, Hendrix' paternal grandmother. The illegitimate son of a black slave woman named Fanny and her white overseer, Jimi's paternal grandfather, Bertran Philander Ross Hendrix (born 1866), was named after his biological father, a grain dealer from Urbana, Ohio, and one of the wealthiest white men in the area at the time. On June 10, 1919, Hendrix and Moore had a son they named James Allen Ross Hendrix (died 2002); people called him Al.

In 1941, Al met Lucille Jeter (1925–1958) at a dance in Seattle; they married on March 31, 1942. Drafted into the United States Army due to World War II, Al went to war three days after their wedding. Born Johnny Allen Hendrix on November 27, 1942 in Seattle, Washington, the first of five children born to Lucille, in 1946, having been unable to consult Johnny's father Al Hendrix, serving in the US army at the time, about his son's name, they changed Johnny's name to James Marshall Hendrix, in honor of Al, and Al's late brother Leon Marshall. As a young child, friends and family called James "Buster"; his brother Leon claims that Jimi chose the nickname after his hero Buster Crabbe, of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers fame.

Al completed his basic training at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Stationed in Alabama at the time of Johnny's birth, and having been denied the standard military furlough afforded servicemen for childbirth, the commanding officer placed him in the stockade as a preventative measure against him going AWOL to Seattle to see his new son. Al spent two months locked-up without trial, and while in the stockade, he received a telegram announcing his son's birth. Al spent most of his time in the service in the South Pacific Theater, in Fiji. During his three-year absence, Lucille struggled to raise her infant son, often neglecting him in favor of nightlife. Family members and friends mostly cared for Hendrix during this period, notably Lucille's sister, Delores Hall, and her friend Dorothy Harding. Al received an honorable discharge from the U.S. Army on September 1, 1945. Two months later, unable to find Lucille, he went to the Berkeley home of a family friend who had taken care of, and attempted to adopt Jimi, Mrs. Champ, where he met his son for the first time.

Another key member of the family circle was Jimi's paternal grandmother, Nora Hendrix. A former vaudeville dancer, she moved to Vancouver, Canada, from Tennessee after meeting her husband, former special police officer Bertram Philander Ross Hendrix, on the Dixieland circuit. Nora shared a love for theatrical clothing and adornment, music, and performance with Jimi. She also imbued him with the stories, rituals and music that had been part of her own Afro-Cherokee heritage and her former life on the stage. Along with his attendance at black Pentecostal church services, writers have suggested these experiences may later have informed Hendrix's thinking about the connections between emotions, spirituality and music.

Jimi's relationship with his brother Leon (born 1948) was close but precarious; with Leon in and out of foster care, they lived with an almost continuous threat of fraternal separation. In addition to Leon, Jimi had three other younger siblings, Joseph, born 1949, Kathy in 1950, and Pamela, 1951, all of whom Al and Lucille surrendered into foster care and adoption.

After his 1946 return from service, Al reunited with Lucille, but his difficulty finding steady work left the family impoverished. Both he and Lucille struggled with alcohol and fought frequently. At one point a pimp named John Page who had a history with Lucille even tried to commandeer her out of a movie theater while she was with Al. Al objected and a fight ensued, spilling out into the street. Al had been an amateur boxer and stunned the pimp with a first punch, eventually winning the brawl and they never saw the pimp again. His parents' fighting sometimes made Hendrix withdraw and hide in a closet in their home. The family moved often, staying in cheap hotels and apartments around Seattle. On occasion Hendrix was taken to Vancouver to stay at his grandmother's and sometimes his uncle Frank's family. A shy, sensitive boy, all these experiences deeply and irrevocably affected Hendrix.

In addition to the instability of his home life as a child, in later years Hendrix confided to one girlfriend that he had been the victim of sexual abuse by a man, although he did not go into detail. Once while he was living in Harlem, he broke down crying as his girlfriend related the sexual abuse she had suffered as a child, telling her that the same thing had happened to him.

On December 17, 1951, when Hendrix was nine years old, his parents divorced; the court granted Al custody of Jimi and Leon. At thirty-three, his mother had developed cirrhosis of the liver and died on February 2, 1958 when her spleen ruptured. Instead of letting his boys attend their mother's funeral, Al Hendrix instructed them on how "men dealt with their grief", by giving them shots of whiskey. Some of Hendrix's feelings about his mother's death were revealed in a survey he took for the British publication, New Musical Express in 1967: "Personal ambition: Have my own style of music. See my mother again."