Jimi Hendrix and The Cultural Politics of Popular Music 2018

JIMI HENDRIX AND
THE CULTURAL
POLITICS OF
POPULAR MUSIC
Aaron Lefkovitz
Jimi Hendrix and the Cultural Politics
of Popular Music
Aaron Lefkovitz
Jimi Hendrix
and the Cultural
Politics of Popular
Music
Aaron Lefkovitz
The City Colleges of Chicago
Chicago, IL, USA
ISBN 978-3-319-77012-3 ISBN 978-3-319-77013-0 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77013-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018935694
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Contents
1 Jimi Hendrix—Gypsy Eyes, Voodoo Child,

and Countercultural Symbol 1
2 “I Don’t Want to Be a Clown Anymore”: Jimi Hendrix

as Racialized Freak and Black-Transnational Icon 25
3 Jimi Hendrix and Black-Transnational Popular Music’s

Global Gender and Sexualized Histories 67
4 Jimi Hendrix, the 1960s Counterculture,

and Confirmations and Critiques of US Cultural
Mythologies 93
5 Conclusion 141
Index 147
v
CHAPTER 1
Jimi Hendrix—Gypsy Eyes, Voodoo Child,

and Countercultural Symbol
Abstract Focusing on Jimi Hendrix’s relationships with the transnational

politics of race, gender, sexuality, class, nation, visual culture, and popular
music, this chapter notes ways Hendrix, living during the tumultuous
1960s countercultural era of upheaval, occupies a singular place in the
histories of popular music. Highlighting Hendrix’s early years in Seattle
and ascent to becoming one of rock music’s pre-eminent musicians, this
chapter highlights Hendrix’s links to racial, gender, and sexual stereotypes
proliferating in US and transnational visual cultures and locates Hendrix
in legacies of black-face minstrelsy, US and international “freak show”
traditions, and black popular music’s global roots. Connecting Hendrix to
other black-transnational male icons as a world-historical artist-activist,
this chapter emphasizes ways Hendrix, as a prominent recording artist,
musical pioneer, and politicized and historical figure, relates to categories
of racial, gender, sexual, class, and national difference.
Keywords Gypsy • Voodoo • Counterculture • Rhythm and Blues
Transversing US, UK, and transnational racial hierarchies, with strong

desires to demarcate, surveil, enforce, and police-fixed racial borders, as a
partly colored, racially interstitial being and extra-terrestrial racial, gender,
sexual, and popular musical other, political, cultural, and transnational
© The Author(s) 2018 1

A. Lefkovitz, Jimi Hendrix and the Cultural Politics of Popular Music,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77013-0_1
2 A. LEFKOVITZ
border crosser Jimi Hendrix (1942–1970), rock guitarist, singer, and song-
writer, highlights dominant political-cultural categories of race, gender,
sexuality, class, nation, visual culture, and popular music in his mid-
twentieth-century transnational biography. Hendrix’s “freakish” appear-
ance and performances, centrality to racial visual-cultural stereotypes,
legacies of threatening and non-threatening black-transnational masculini-
ties, the 1960s counterculture, US mythologies of popular musical excep-
tionalism, and transgression of hegemonic US cultural Cold War practices
privilege an entertainer, symbol, and political-cultural figure who mastered
the electric guitar, composed tender rock songs, and occupied an out-of-
place yet “in-between” position in US and transnational popular cultures.
A musical pioneer and experimenter, taking rock music to radical and
unique places, Hendrix fused jazz, blues, and soul with British avant-garde
rock to dramatically redefine the electric guitar’s expressive potential and
sonic palette. Though his career as a featured artist lasted only four years,
Hendrix altered popular music’s trajectory and became one of the 1960s
countercultural era’s most influential musicians. Hendrix composed a classic
repertoire of rock songs, from ferocious compositions to delicate, complex
ballads. An exotic, racialized “freak” whose appeal linked white hippies and
black revolutionaries by masking black anger with the colorful costumes of
London’s Carnaby Street, Hendrix came to epitomize this area and its
iconic heritage as the birthplace of 1960s “swinging London,” the home of
mods, skinheads, punks, new romantics, and twenty-first- century street
styles, and the epicenter of culture and lifestyle in London’s West End.
A US Army paratrooper during the military’s nascent desegregation
period,1 unable to conform to militaristic rigidity, Hendrix had an
unorthodox style and predilection for playing at a high volume. Self-
taught, Hendrix absorbed the recorded legacy of Southern-blues practi-
tioners. Joining R&B2 bands and touring revues, the experience and
stagecraft Hendrix gained during this formative period was a major fac-
tor in his development. Hendrix spent years on the road with Little
Richard (1932–), the flamboyant R&B singer, songwriter, and pianist
whose mid-1950s hit songs were defining moments in rock and roll’s
maturation,3 the Isley Brothers, an R&B and rock band that began
recording in the late 1950s and continued to have hit records in the
1960s and 1970s, and King Curtis (1934–1971), a saxophone virtuoso
known for R&B, rock and roll, blues, funk, soul, and soul jazz. A
bandleader, band member, and session musician, Curtis was also a musi-
JIMI HENDRIX—GYPSY EYES, VOODOO CHILD, AND COUNTERCULTURAL… 3
cal director and record producer. Adept at tenor, alto, and soprano saxo-
phone, Curtis was best known for his distinctive riffs and solos, heard on
such songs as “Yakety Yak” (1958).
Hendrix was engaged as a backing guitarist by Little Richard when,
during a 1963 Southern tour, he met blues guitarist Albert King, who
taught him the technique of bending notes, reworking music’s intention-
ality, and repositioning popular music as a bridge between cultivated and
vernacular cultures. Hendrix toured with singer Solomon Burke
(1940–2010), whose early 1960s success in merging the African-American
church’s gospel style with R&B helped usher in the soul-music era, The
Supremes, the pop-soul vocal group whose tremendous popularity with a
broad audience made its members among the 1960s’ most successful per-
formers and Motown Records’4 flagship act, the husband-and-wife team
of Ike and Tina Turner, considered one of the hottest, most durable, and
explosive R&B ensembles, and B.B. King (1925–2015), guitarist and
singer who was a principal figure in the blues’ development and from
whose style leading popular musicians drew inspiration.
Hendrix also backed the Impressions, an African-American group
formed in 1958 whose repertoire included doo-wop,5 gospel, soul, and
R&B, and Sam Cooke (1931–1964), singer, songwriter, producer, and
entrepreneur. Cooke was a major figure in popular music histories and one
of the most influential post-World War II black vocalists, along with Ray
Charles (1930–2004), pianist, singer, composer, bandleader, and a leading
black-transnational entertainer billed as “the Genius,” credited with the
early development of soul music, a style based on a melding of gospel,
R&B, and jazz.6 While Charles represented soul at its most raw, Cooke
symbolized soul’s “sweetness,” with “disciples” ranging from Smokey
Robinson to James Taylor and Michael Jackson.7
Hendrix also performed with the Valentinos, a Cleveland, Ohio-based
family R&B group, famous for launching the careers of brothers Bobby
and Cecil Womack. The former brother found more fame as a solo artist
while the latter found success as a member of the husband-and-wife team
of Womack & Womack with Linda Cooke. During their 22-year career,
the group was known for such R&B hits as “Lookin’ for a Love,” covered
by the J. Geils Band and later a solo hit for Bobby Womack, and “It’s All
Over Now,” covered by the Rolling Stones.
In Chicago, Hendrix visited the Chess recording studios, a company
founded in 1950 and specializing in blues and R&B. Over time, it
expanded into soul, gospel, early rock and roll, and occasional jazz and
4 A. LEFKOVITZ
comedy recordings, released on the Chess, Checker, Argo, and Cadet

labels. Founded and run by Leonard and Phil Chess, Jewish immigrant
brothers from Poland, the company produced and released many singles
and albums central to rock music. Chess has been described as the US’s
greatest blues label, for whom such musicians as Muddy Waters (1913?–
1983), the dynamic blues guitarist and singer who played a major role in
creating post-World War II electric blues, recorded. Hendrix had hands-
on experience in the political-cultural worlds in which black popular music
developed, while greatly admiring the work of “white bluesmen” Bob
Dylan, the Beatles, and Yardbirds, a 1960s British group best known for
their inventive conversion of R&B into rock. Original members included
Eric Clapton, a highly influential rock musician who later became a major
singer-songwriter, Keith Relf, Chris Dreja, Jim McCarty, Paul Samwell-
Smith, and Anthony (“Top”) Topham, with later members including Jeff
Beck and Jimmy Page, the British musician, songwriter, and record pro-
ducer who achieved transnational success as the guitarist and founder of
the rock band Led Zeppelin.
In late 1965, Hendrix moved to Greenwich Village, the area that,
beginning in the early twentieth century and especially since the early
1950s Beat movement,8 had been a mecca for creative radicals from all
over the US, including artists, poets, jazz musicians, and guitar-playing
folk and blues singers. In coffee houses like Cafe Wha? on MacDougal
Street and Gerde’s Folk City at 11 West 4th Street, such singers as Bob
Dylan, Paul Simon, and Fred Neil played for a few dollars to small crowds,
discovering which songs worked and what to say between them. In
Greenwich Village, Hendrix connected with white folk-rock musicians,
played blues, rock and roll, Dylan’s songs, and won the admiration of the
Rolling Stones, Dylan’s guitarist, and legendary jazz producer and talent
scout John Hammond (1910–1987), promoter, music critic, crusader for
racial integration in the music business, and regarded as the most impor-
tant non-musician in jazz histories, who promoted major popular music
figures, from Count Basie and Billie Holiday in the 1930s to Bruce
Springsteen during the rock era (and who engaged Hendrix to play lead
guitar in Dylan’s group). “All Along the Watchtower,” Hendrix’s only US
Top 20 hit, restated Dylan’s song, and Dylan adopted Hendrix’s interpre-
tation when performing it live on his 1974 tour.9
In search of more receptive audiences, Hendrix arrived in London in
September 1966. His new unit, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, made its
debut the following month in the French town of Évreux, between Paris
and the English Channel. On returning to England, The Jimi Hendrix
Experience began a string of club engagements attracting pop’s
“aristocracy,” including Pete Townshend (1945–), British singer, song-
writer, and multi-instrumentalist, best known as the lead guitarist, backing
vocalist, and main songwriter for the rock band The Who. Townshend’s
career with The Who spans over 50 years, during which time the band
grew to be among the 1960s’ and 1970s’ most popular and influential
bands, originating the “rock opera” subgenre. Adapting late 1966
London’s musical and clothing fashions, Hendrix could soon match The
Who at their high-volume, guitar-smashing game. Hendrix, with his racial,
gender, and sexual difference, compounded and magnified The Who’s
instrumental destruction, onstage aggression, and youthful defiance with
his exoticism, transforming Hendrix from a virtuoso guitarist to a world-
historical symbol inhabiting various degrees of extra-musical significance.
In popular musical, racial, gender, and sexual terms, Hendrix contrasted
with The Who in terms of the hyper-sexuality of his performances (feign-
ing oral sex on the guitar) and his own racialized sexuality, making his
sexualized performances all the more exotic, provocative, and seemingly
confrontational.
The hottest ticket in town, The Jimi Hendrix Experience became the
opening act for the British rock trio Cream, whose guitarist Eric Clapton
was impressed with Hendrix’s playing. As Mitch Mitchell’s drumming
provided a foundation for the band’s debut and first Top Ten single, the
understated, resonant “Hey Joe” (1966), Mitchell’s jazz-inflected rhythms
complemented Hendrix’s guitar playing on the group’s first album, Are
You Experienced? (1967), notably on the tracks “Manic Depression” and
“Third Stone from the Sun.” Hendrix amazed London’s club culture with
his instrumental virtuosity and extroverted showmanship, even as he was
aware of the popular musical and racial roots on which his cutting-edge
rock was based. Are You Experienced? rivaled the influence of Sgt. Pepper’s
Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), the eighth studio album by the British
rock band the Beatles.
Featuring the blues of “Red House” and funk of “Fire” and “Foxy
Lady,” Are You Experienced? was a commercial and critical success, spend-
ing 27 weeks at the top of the UK album charts and 15 weeks at number
one in the US. Lauded by critics for its innovations in musical production,
songwriting, and graphic design, Are You Experienced? bridged a divide
between popular music and legitimate art and provided a musical
6 A. LEFKOVITZ
expression of the countercultural generation, denoting a type of self-

expression and individuality in somber and psychedelic tones, contrasting
with some of the more idealistic and rose-colored sounds heard in the US.
Are You Experienced? was notable for its unusual sound effects, which
Hendrix devised with his recording engineer. These included building up
multiple tracks on four-track equipment, the manipulation of tape speeds,
mixing down of some material played backwards, use of controlled feed-
back, phase shifting, Fuzz Face and Cry Baby sound-effect pedals, and
special effects achieved through the manipulation of the tremolo arm and
toggle switch controlling the pickups’ selection and combination.
As The Jimi Hendrix Experience enjoyed reverent audiences, Hendrix’s
second album, Axis: Bold as Love (1967), was characterized by more imag-
istic lyrics, refined song structures, and complex, skillful arrangements,
creating soulful rhythm and melody from the multi-tracking of guitar
parts. Axis: Bold as Love revealed a new lyrical capability, notably in the
title track, the jazz-influenced “Up from the Skies,” and the frequently
covered “Little Wing,” a delicate love song featuring unhurried guitar
splashes with a gentle perspective, echoing Hendrix’s shy and unassuming
offstage demeanor. Released in December 1967, the collection put a cap-
stone on an artistic and commercially successful year, as Hendrix increased
his popularity in the UK, with the BBC’s Radio 1 providing an official
outlet for the newly arrived artist’s creativity.
Gaining transnational attention, Hendrix’s innovative guitar techniques
strongly affected other musicians. When the expatriate Hendrix made his
triumphant US return with Are You Experienced?, he merged UK pop psy-
chedelia, R&B, Dylan, and Cream into a rock and roll amalgam. Few in the
rock scene looked or sounded like The Jimi Hendrix Experience and its
musical and cultural experimentations and exchanges. As Hendrix flew to
California for his scene-stealing appearance at the legendary 1967 Monterey
International Pop Music Festival, rendering him a sensation in the US, in
his hard-rock band, Hendrix extended his rhythmic virtuosity to include
the intimate blues of John Lee Hooker (1917–2001), African-American
singer-guitarist and one of the most distinctive electric blues artists; Dylan’s
lyrical poetry; the Beatles’ hallucinatory studio fantasias; and the improvi-
sational skills of John Coltrane (1926–1967), jazz saxophonist, bandleader,
composer, and iconic figure.10 At Monterey, Hendrix’s sensational perfor-
mance was the event’s highlight. A musical, visual, racial, gender, and sex-
ual spectacle, Hendrix’s performance culminated in a sequence that saw
him playing the guitar with his teeth and then burning the instrument with
lighter fuel. Defining Hendrix as an artist and appearing on the cover of

Rolling Stone magazine twice, the photograph of Hendrix burning his gui-
tar at Monterey became one of rock and roll’s most powerful images and
contributed to the caricature of Hendrix as a racialized “freak” whose per-
formative spectacles contributed to his perceived racial, gender, and sexual
exoticism.11
At the iconic 1969 Woodstock Festival, Hendrix performed one of the
twentieth century’s most explicit popular musical protests. In his solo per-
formance of the US national anthem, a militaristic composition continu-
ing to stir controversy into the twenty-first century, as National Football
League players “take a knee” during its playing to protest continued US
white supremacy in the criminal justice system and other spheres, Hendrix
bent notes and offered a variety of distortions and embellishments, decon-
structing this sacred nationalistic song while the Vietnam War raged and
counterculture pervaded US college campuses and culture more broadly,
all the while inserting “Taps,” a bugle call played at dusk, during flag cer-
emonies, and at military funerals by the US Armed Forces, with the official
military version played by a single bugle or trumpet, in a kind of memorial
to the fallen US troops in Southeast Asia.
During Hendrix’s US tour, his controversial performances provided
him with enough exposure to facilitate his transnational rise. By 1968,
Hendrix was involved in group improvisations with New York jazz musi-
cians and expressed an interest in playing with Miles Davis (1926–1991),
the African-American jazz trumpeter who, as a bandleader and composer,
was one of the major influences on the genre from the late 1940s and
whose fusion of jazz and rock showed the influences of Hendrix’s funky
rhythms and colorful textures.12 The last official Jimi Hendrix Experience
album, Electric Ladyland, was released in October 1968. This extravagant
double set has been recognized as a major work, featuring a succession of
virtuoso performances. Electric Ladyland revealed Hendrix’s desire to
expand the increasingly limiting trio format. Contributions from members
of Traffic and Jefferson Airplane, a psychedelic rock band best known for
its hallucinogenic titles, harmonies, political lyrics, and an important
standard-bearer for the 1960s counterculture, elaborated several selec-
tions. As he continued to search for new equipment and effects experi-
mentations, Electric Ladyland contains some of Hendrix’s most highly
developed psychedelic music, featuring profuse soundscapes. Hendrix
continually changed his programs to find a more sophisticated, black
“electric church music.”
8 A. LEFKOVITZ
Hendrix had an idiosyncratic and compelling vocal style, a form of

heightened speech with roots in blues and soul. His revolutionary guitar
techniques and innovative use of the recording studio as a compositional
tool, forecasting such groups as Pink Floyd and others, had a great impact
on rock music. Due to the ways his songs and instrumental numbers are
not easily separated from his individualized style, Hendrix’s repertoire has
been infrequently recorded by other musicians. More superlatives have
been given to Hendrix than any other rock guitarist. These include a rock
immortal, one of the greatest rockers the world has ever known, rock’s
most gifted and inventive guitarist, one of music’s most influential figures,
who brought an unparalleled vision to the art of playing electric guitar,
and one of the foremost innovators of popular music.
Hendrix illuminates histories of the electric guitar, an iconic instrument
with a profound impact on popular music and culture.13 The electric gui-
tar became a transnational symbol of freedom, danger, rebellion, and
hedonism. Its histories include inventors, iconoclasts, scam artists, prodi-
gies, and mythologizers. With landmark guitars functioning as artistic
milestones, some of the twentieth century’s most significant political-
cultural movements became indebted to the electric guitar. The instru-
ment was an element in the fight for racial equality in the entertainment
industry, a reflection of the rise of the teenager as a political-cultural force,
and a linchpin of punk’s sound and ethos. In addition to Hendrix, electric-
guitar histories include those artists bringing some of the earliest electric-
guitar forms to the limelight, such as Jack White of The White Stripes,
Annie Clark (aka St. Vincent), and Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys.
Figures in the electric guitar’s development also include Leo Fender
(1909–1991), US inventor and manufacturer of electronic musical instru-
ments, whose innovations helped transform the guitar into a dynamic
sound machine; Les Paul (1915–2009), jazz and country guitarist and
inventor; Keith Richards (1943–), British guitarist, singer, songwriter, and
author, best known as a founding member of the Rolling Stones and cred-
ited with composing rock’s greatest single body of riffs on guitar; Carlos
Santana (1947–), Mexican-born guitarist whose popular music combined
rock, jazz, blues, and Afro-Cuban rhythms; Eddie Van Halen (1955–),
Dutch-American songwriter, producer, best known as the lead guitarist,
occasional keyboardist, and co-founder of the US hard-rock band Van
Halen, and considered one of the most influential guitarists in rock music
histories; and Steve Vai (1960–), a highly individualistic guitarist, com-
poser, singer, songwriter, and producer, touring with the live-only act the
Experience Hendrix tour, and part of a generation of heavy rock and metal
virtuosi who came to the fore in the 1980s.
Hendrix influenced musicians of all ages, as countless guitarists imitated
his technique, few mastered it, and none matched him as an inspirational
player. The electric guitar in Hendrix’s hands was transformed into an
extension of his body. The sounds Hendrix created were loud, sustained,
and full-textured, with much use of expressive timbral nuances, though
they had a basic toughness. Along with his concept of “electric church
music” (intended to wash people’s souls and give them a new direction),
Hendrix wished to be remembered as not just another guitar player. A left-
hander who took a right-handed Fender Stratocaster and played it upside
down, Hendrix’s theatrical style included sexual undulations and showman
tricks, such as playing the guitar with his teeth and behind his back. Hendrix
pioneered the use of the guitar as an electronic sound source. Players before
him experimented with feedback and distortion, but Hendrix turned those
and other effects into a controlled, fluid vocabulary.
Emblematic of 1960s countercultural ideologies and political aesthet-
ics, Hendrix was simultaneously a member of the “Flower Power” and
Black Power movements, in opposition to the Vietnam War and contro-
versially supporting the New York Panther 21, a group of 21 Black Panther
members who were arrested and accused of planning coordinated bomb-
ing and long-range rifle attacks on two police stations and an education
office in New York City. Hendrix’s work provides a source of inspiration
to successive generations of musicians to whom he remains a touchstone
for emotional honesty, technological innovation, and an all-inclusive vision
of universal brotherhood.
Audacious and lyrical, Hendrix’s fluency on electric guitar was with-
out equal. As his way with words paralleled his music, Hendrix brought
new perspectives to each style he performed, from blues to pop and
psychedelia. Hendrix displayed a clarity in his musical thinking as his
vision moved beyond his trio’s confines. Hendrix was one of the 1960s’
most significant political-cultural figures, a psychedelic Gypsy and
“Voodoo child” who spewed clouds of distortion and marijuana smoke,
playing on while subverting the racial, gender, and sexual caricatures
that historically constrained black-transnational musicians. While he
unleashed noise with uncanny mastery in the hard-rock riffs of
“Crosstown Traffic” (1968), Hendrix created such tender ballads as
“The Wind Cries Mary” (1967) and “Angel” (1971). Though Hendrix
10 A. LEFKOVITZ
did not consider himself a good singer, his vocals were nearly as evoca-
tive as his guitar playing.
Hendrix’s studio craft and virtuosity with conventional and unconven-
tional guitar sounds were widely imitated. His songs inspired tribute
albums and have been recorded by a jazz group (Hendrix Project [1989])
and the Kronos String Quartet, a group based in San Francisco, in exis-
tence, with a rotating membership, for over 40 years, and specializing in
contemporary classical music. Hendrix had a profound effect on the psy-
chedelia, funk, outrageous stage shows, and personas of Sly Stone, song-
writer, social satirist, and bandleader most famous for his role as frontman
for Sly and the Family Stone, a band that played a critical role in soul,
funk, rock, and psychedelia’s development in the 1960s and 1970s;
George Clinton (1941–), singer, songwriter, bandleader, and record pro-
ducer whose band, Parliament-Funkadelic, developed a form of funk
music during the 1970s and early 1980s termed P-Funk; and OutKast, a
rap duo formed in 1992 that put Atlanta, Georgia on the hip hop map and
redefined the G-Funk (a variation of gangsta rap) and Dirty South (an
often profane hip hop form that emerged in the South) styles with their
strong melodies, intricate lyrics, and positive messages.
In addition to his virtuosic guitar playing, gifted songwriting, ahead-of-
his-time attention to studio production, and electric stage presence,
Hendrix was an icon representing his tumultuous era. In the decades since
Hendrix’s death, pop stars evoked Hendrix’s look, style, and countercul-
tural political aesthetics. This includes long-haired, leather-clad Rick James
(1948–2004), the US musician and singer who wrote such classic funk
hits as “Super Freak” (1981), known for his sexually explicit lyrics, beats,
and a wild offstage lifestyle; Prince (1958–2016), singer, songwriter, pro-
ducer, dancer, and performer on guitar, keyboards, drums, and bass, who
was among the most talented US musicians of his generation; Lenny
Kravitz (1964–), singer, songwriter, actor, and record producer whose
“retro” style incorporates elements of rock, blues, soul, R&B, funk, jazz,
reggae, hard rock, psychedelia, pop, folk, and ballads; and Erykah Badu
(1971–), an R&B singer whose “neo-soul” vocals drew comparisons with
jazz legend Billie Holiday.
A racialized “freak,” part of a legacy of black-transnational popular
musicians reinforcing and subverting racial, gender, and sexual stereo-
types, Hendrix’s political-cultural meanings, sexual mystery, and scientific
explorations in the field of sound can be addressed from historical, politi-
cal, and popular musical perspectives. A man who, despite his popular
appeal, has not made it into the pantheon of twentieth-century black-

transnational figures, before hip hop became popular with white suburban
youths, Hendrix transversed a segregated world to emerge as an icon for
white fans. A perfectionist and brilliant composer whose imaginative
sound effects were limited only by equipment, Hendrix was an African-
American artist under pressure from radical black groups because his audi-
ence was predominantly white. Revolutionizing the use of technology in
popular music, controversies and mythologies surround Hendrix and his
music’s racial authenticity. Marketed as a white performer with sex appeal,
especially for black women, as Hendrix redefined rock fashion, the lack of
concern over his sleeping with white women contrasted with Sammy
Davis, Jr. (1925–1990), the African-American singer, dancer, and enter-
tainer who was harassed and threatened for kissing a white woman onstage.
Part of Hendrix’s contested racial authenticity politics include the ways
his songs were not heard on black radio and that some black people viewed
him as a hippie “Uncle Tom,” due to his perceived acquiescence to a
mostly white-dominated counterculture and refusal to infuse an explicit
anti-racism and identifiably black political aesthetic into his repertoire and
public statements. During his career, Hendrix was judged by many as a
fraud and sellout, his blackness rendering his music as inauthentically rock,
while his music rendered his person as inauthentically black. The “Uncle
Tom” insult stems from abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s
Cabin (1852). In this anti-slavery, religious-themed novel, Stowe fore-
grounds the representative character of Uncle Tom, a dutiful, long-
suffering servant faithful to his white master. A pro-slavery stooge and
scorned figure in US culture, with ramifications into the twenty-first cen-
tury, the eponymous, desexualized, and pious protagonist of Uncle Tom’s
Cabin influenced racialized roles in film and on television. The “black-on-
black” “Uncle Tom” insult denotes African-Americans’ subservience to
whites, betrayal of other African-Americans, and that the “Uncle Tom”
has been complicit in his own racial subjection.14
In addition to his relationships with the Black Power movement,
Hendrix electrified soul music and made the electric guitar supplant the
human voice. Hendrix subverted and destabilized black-transnational
racial, gender, and sexual stereotypes and changed the ways black music
and racial identities were perceived. Contestations abound over the degree
of Hendrix’s authentic blackness, multiple racial meanings, fixed and fluid
gender identities, hetero-normativity, and sexual mysteries. Adored by
whites, Hendrix exerted an ongoing hold on his audience through his
12 A. LEFKOVITZ
exotic race, gender, and sexuality. A black-transnational subject uniquely

performing the confluence of categories of race, gender, sexuality, class,
nation, and popular music, whose pre-political visual images continue to
circulate, Hendrix’s mid-twentieth-century black-transnational biogra-
phy contributes to the political-cultural study of popular music and its
racial, gender, sexual, class, national, international, and visual-cultural
dynamics.
An itinerant, psychedelic bluesman and rebel, global sojourner, Jimi
Hendrix was more than a performer, as millions of fans in the US and
around the world knew. Hendrix occupied multiple, interstitial spaces:
between black and the dominant white-supremacist culture; sideshow
“freak” and serious, respected musician; and US exceptionalist symbol and
transnational and extra-terrestrial being negotiating sub and super-human
realms beyond the cognition of the everyday. A self-described “Voodoo
child” and member of the Band of Gypsys, Hendrix’s strategic positioning
between these two migrant, mysterious, and transnational border-crossing
political cultures centers him as a black-transnational musician who took
rock beyond the assumed US hetero-normative and exceptionalist con-
straints of FM radio and its tired clichés (even as he traded in them) and
expanded the palette of popular music by reintroducing it to its global and
non-conformist roots.
“Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” (1968) demonstrated ways Hendrix
brought rhythm, purpose, and mastery to the recently invented wah-wah
pedal while exploiting and merging Voodoo’s exotic, African, and
Caribbean identities and visual-cultural stereotypes with his own brand of
racialized and “freakish” fantasies. As the term “Voodoo” elicits reactions
from fear to fascination and thoughts of pins stuck in dolls, hexes, and
strange rites, few understand anything about its practice. Hendrix’s utili-
zation of myths of Gypsys and Voodoo and his early fascination with sci-
ence fiction and UFOs, helping him escape a difficult family life (he
insisted his family call him “Buster” after actor Buster Crabbe, who per-
formed the title role in the fantasy film Flash Gordon [1936]), illuminate
ways Hendrix identified with cultural outsiders as a non-conformist, cross-
ing racial, gender, sexual, and national borders.
Besides capitalizing on Voodoo mythologies, Hendrix constructed
himself as a type of racialized Gypsy, wandering among various transna-
tional populations and categories, as his racial, gender, sexual, and national
belonging was contested. Once The Jimi Hendrix Experience played its
final concert on June 29th, 1969, Hendrix formed Gypsy Sun and
Rainbows, the group that closed the Woodstock Festival with Hendrix’s
famed reworking and solo electric guitar version of the “Star Spangled
Banner.” In October 1969, Hendrix formed Band of Gypsys, an all-black
group, accentuating his music’s racialized and exotic dimensions. While
the track “Gypsy Eyes,” a combination of blues/psychedelia and based on
a standard blues field holler, was performed by The Jimi Hendrix
Experience on their 1968 album Electric Ladyland, on the Band of Gypsies
(1970) live album, the quality of Hendrix’s playing continues to be fluid
and clear.
Part of a long line of guitar virtuosi, Hendrix’s Gypsy identities echo
world-renowned Gypsy, jazz guitarist, bandleader, and composer Django
Reinhardt (1910–1953), generally considered one of the few European jazz
musicians of true originality. Foreshadowing Hendrix, the legendary
Reinhardt made his guitar speak with a human voice. Handsome, charis-
matic, childlike, unpredictable, and similarly dying young, Reinhardt cre-
ated a legacy of Gypsy jazz that remains vibrant. The most famous Gypsy of
all time, Reinhardt vies with Hendrix for the title of greatest guitarist who
ever lived. Reinhardt was an important influence on Les Paul, B.B. King,
Jerry Garcia (1942–1995), the singer-songwriter and guitarist best known
for his work with the Grateful Dead band, which came to prominence dur-
ing the 1960s counterculture, Chet Atkins (1924–2001), the country-and-
western guitarist and record company executive credited with developing
the “Nashville Sound,” Wes Montgomery (1923–1968), a jazz guitarist and
probably the most influential post-World War II improviser on his instru-
ment, and John McLaughlin, whose highly energetic, eclectic solos made
him one of the most popular and influential jazz-rock musicians.15
In his long musical partnership with violinist Stéphane Grappelli and
their novel string jazz ensemble, Quintette du Hot Club de France, Reinhardt
became one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated jazz artists. Like a
character out of a picaresque novel, Reinhardt was born in a Gypsy caravan
at a crossroads in Belgium. Almost killed in a fire in 1928 that burned half
of his body and left his left hand twisted into a claw, Reinhardt became, with
his maimed hand flying over the frets and right hand plucking at dizzying
speed, Europe’s most famous jazz musician, commanding exorbitant fees,
and spending the money as fast as he made it. Performing a subgenre of
supposedly quintessential US exceptionalist music, Reinhardt and others’
Gypsy jazz has been characterized as a music joyous and sad, timeless and
modern. Born from a marriage of Louis Armstrong’s trumpet with the
“anguished sound” of Romany violin and the “fire” of flamenco guitar,
14 A. LEFKOVITZ
Gypsy jazz was created amidst the glamour of Jazz Age Paris, reaching a
peak during the horrors of World War II, and giving a voice to a dispos-
sessed people. In his colorful life, illuminating a “fascinating” Gypsy culture,
representing a timeless Romany wistfulness and the lingering melancholy of
an itinerant people, Reinhardt’s subcultural mythologies and exoticism echo
Hendrix, with each living on in transnationally disseminated popular visual
and musical cultures. Reinhardt’s visual-cultural representations can be
seen in the film Django (2017), the story of Reinhardt and his flight from
German-occupied Paris in 1943. Reinhardt became interested in composi-
tion and, with André Hodeir, arranged the music for the film Le Village de
la Colère (1946). Reinhardt’s sensitivity and musical gifts were the basis for
his appearance as a character in Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles. A doc-
umentary film, Django Reinhardt (1958), was made after his death by the
director Paul Paviot and includes an introduction by Cocteau, with music
performed by Grappelli and Reinhardt’s brother Joseph.16
Notes
1. Ronald S. Coddington, African American Faces of the Civil War: An
Album (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012); Ron
Field & Alexander M. Bielakowski, Buffalo Soldiers: African American
Troops in the US Forces, 1866–1945 (Oxford; New York: Osprey Pub.,
2008); W. Douglas Fisher & Joann H. Buckley, African American Doctors
of World War I: The Lives of 104 Volunteers (Jefferson, NC: McFarland &
Company, Inc., Publishers, 2016); Maria Höhn & Martin Klimke, A
Breath of Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and
Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Maureen Honey, Bitter
Fruit: African American Women in World War II (Columbia, MO:
University of Missouri Press, 1999); A Yemisi Jimoh & Françoise
N. Hamlin, These Truly Are the Brave: An Anthology of African American
Writings on War and Citizenship (Gainesville: University Press of Florida,
2015); Ian Michael Spurgeon, Soldiers in the Army of Freedom: The 1st
Kansas Colored, the Civil War’s First African American Combat Unit
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014); Nina Mjagkij, Loyalty in
the Time of Trial: The African American Experience in World War I
(Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2015); Cheryl
Mullenbach, Double Victory: How African American Women Broke Race
and Gender Barriers to Help Win World War II (Chicago: Chicago Review
Press, 2013); National Museum of African American History and Culture
(US), Smithsonian Institution, Earl W. and Amanda Stafford Center for
African American Media Arts, Fighting for Freedom: Photographs from the
National Museum of African American History and Culture (Washington,
DC: National Museum of African American History and Culture,
Smithsonian Institution; London: D. Giles Limited, 2017); Emiel
W. Owens, Blood on German Snow: An African American Artilleryman in
World War II and Beyond (College Station: Texas A & M Univ. Press,
2006); Jeffrey T. Sammons, Harlem’s Rattlers and the Great War: The
Undaunted 369th Regiment and the African American Quest for Equality
(Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2014); John David Smith,
Black Soldiers in Blue: African American Troops in the Civil War Era
(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); David
L. Valuska, The African American in the Union Navy, 1861–1865 (New
York: Garland Pub., 1993); Judith L. Van Buskirk, Standing in Their Own
Light: African American Patriots in the American Revolution (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 2017); Joe Wilson, The 761st “Black
Panther” Tank Battalion in World War II: An Illustrated History of the
First African American Armored Unit to See Combat (Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 2006).
2. Michael Awkward, Soul Covers: Rhythm and Blues Remakes and the Struggle
for Artistic Identity: (Aretha Franklin, Al Green, Phoebe Snow) (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2007); Shane K. Bernard, Swamp Pop: Cajun and
Creole Rhythm and Blues (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi,
1996); Chip Deffaa, Blue Rhythms: Six Lives in Rhythm and Blues (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1996); Joe Evans & Christopher Antonio
Brooks, Follow Your Heart: Moving with the Giants of Jazz, Swing, and
Rhythm and Blues (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008); Peter
Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of
Freedom (New York: Harper & Row, 1986); Bob Leszczak, Who Did It
First?: Great Rhythm and Blues Cover Songs and Their Original Artists
(Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013); Mark Anthony Neal, Songs in the
Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (New York: Routledge,
2003); Richard Stamz, Patrick A. Roberts, & Robert Pruter, Give ‘Em
Soul, Richard!: Race, Radio, and Rhythm and Blues in Chicago (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2010); Michael Urban, New Orleans Rhythm
and Blues After Katrina: Music, Magic and Myth (Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Paul Vernon, African-
American Blues, Rhythm and Blues, Gospel and Zydeco on Film and Video,
1926–1997 (Aldershot, England; Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1999); Brian
Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness,
and Race Relations (London: UCL Press, 1998).
3. Charles Gower Price, “Sources of American Styles in the Music of the
Beatles,” American Music 15.2 (Summer, 1997): 208–232; Marybeth
16 A. LEFKOVITZ
Hamilton, “Sexual Politics and African-American Music; Or, Placing Little

Richard in History,” History Workshop Journal 46 (Autumn, 1998): 160–
176; W.T. Lhamon, Jr., “Little Richard as a Folk Performer,” Studies in
Popular Culture 8.2 (1985): 7–17; Bruce Tucker, “‘Tell Tchaikovsky the
News’: Postmodernism, Popular Culture, and the Emergence of Rock ‘N’
Roll,” Black Music Research Journal 22, Supplement: Best of BMRJ
(2002): 23–47; Mitch Yamasaki, “Using Rock ‘N’ Roll to Teach the
History of Post-World War II America,” The History Teacher 29.2 (Feb.,
1996): 179–193.
4. George C. Galster, Driving Detroit: The Quest for Respect in Motown
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Nelson George,
Where Did Our Love Go?: The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2007); Suzanne E. Smith, Dancing in the
Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1999).
5. David Goldblatt, “Nonsense in Public Places: Songs of Black Vocal Rhythm
and Blues or Doo-Wop,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 71.1,
Special Issue: Song, Songs, & Singing (Winter 2013): 101–110; Stuart
L. Goosman, Group Harmony: The Black Urban Roots of Rhythm and Blues
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Anthony J. Gribin
and Matthew M. Schiff, Doo-Wop: The Forgotten Third of Rock ‘n’ Roll
(Iola, WI: Krause Publications, 1992); John Michael Runowicz, Forever
Doo-Wop: Race, Nostalgia, and Vocal Harmony (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 2010).
6. David Ritz and Ray Charles, Brother Ray: Ray Charles’ Own Story
(Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2009).
7. Nelson George, The Michael Jackson Story (New York: Dell, 1984); Margo
Jefferson, On Michael Jackson (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006); Harriet
J. Manning, Michael Jackson and the Blackface Mask (Surrey, England;
Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013); Christopher R. Smit, Michael Jackson:
Grasping the Spectacle (Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012).
8. Regina Marler, Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America 0On to Sex
(San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2004).
9. Albin J. Zak, III, “Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix: Juxtaposition and
Transformation ‘All Along the Watchtower,’” Journal of the American
Musicological Society 57.3 (Fall 2004): 599–644.
10. Leonard L. Brown, John Coltrane and Black America’s Quest for Freedom:
Spirituality and the Music (New York City: Oxford University Press, 2010);
Bill Cole, John Coltrane (New York: Schirmer Books, 1976); Chris DeVito
and John Coltrane, Coltrane on Coltrane: The John Coltrane Interviews
(Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2010); Farah Jasmine Griffin and Salim
Washington, Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane and
the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever (New York: Thomas Dunne Books,
2008); Ashley Kahn, A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature
Album (New York: Viking, 2002); Frank Kofsky, John Coltrane and the
Jazz Revolution of the 1960s (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1998); Michael
Bruce McDonald, “Training the Nineties, or the Present Relevance of
John Coltrane’s Music of Theophany and Negation,” African American
Review 29.2, Special Issues on The Music (Summer, 1995): 275–282; Eric
Nisenson, Ascension: John Coltrane and His Quest (New York: Da Capo
Press, 1995); Lewis Porter, John Coltrane: His Life and Music (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2008); Tony Whyton, Beyond a Love
Supreme: John Coltrane and the Legacy of an Album (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2013).
11. Ed Caraeff, Burning Desire: The Jimi Hendrix Experience Through the Lens
of Ed Caraeff (London: Iconic Images; Woodbridge, Suffolk: ACC
Editions, 2017).
12. Frank Alkyer, Ed Enright, and Jason Koransky, The Miles Davis Reader
(New York: Hal Leonard Books, 2007); David Baker and Miles Davis, The
Jazz Style of Miles Davis: A Musical and Historical Perspective (Miami:
Studio 224: CPP Belwin, 1980); Gary Carner, The Miles Davis Companion:
Four Decades of Commentary (New York: Schirmer Books, 1996); Ian
Carr, Miles Davis: A Critical Biography (London; New York: Quartet
Books, 1982); Jack Chambers, Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles
Davis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990); Harvey Cohen, Miles
Davis: A Musical Biography (New York: W. Morrow, 1974); George Cole,
The Last Miles: The Music of Miles Davis, 1980–1991 (London: Equinox
Pub., 2005); Richard Cook, It’s About That Time: Miles Davis On and Off
Record (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Gregory
Davis and Les Sussman, Dark Magus: The Jekyll and Hyde Life of Miles
Davis (San Francisco, CA: Backbeat Books; Berkeley, CA: Distributed to
the Book Trade in the US and Canada by Publishers Group West, 2006);
Miles Davis and Scott Gutterman, The Art of Miles Davis (New York:
ARTS: Prentice Hall Editions, 1991); Miles Davis, Paul Maher, and
Michael K. Dorr, Miles on Miles: Interviews and Encounters with Miles
Davis (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2009); Gerald Lyn Early, Miles
Davis and American Culture (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press,
2001); Gerald Lyn Early, “On Miles Davis, Vince Lombardi, & the Crisis
of Masculinity in Mid-Century America,” Daedalus 131.1, On Inequality
(Winter, 2002): 154–159; Phil Freeman, Running the Voodoo Down: The
Electric Music of Miles Davis (San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 2005); Bob
Gluck, The Miles Davis Lost Quintet: And Other Revolutionary Ensembles
(Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Ashley Kahn and
Jimmy Cobb, Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece
18 A. LEFKOVITZ
(Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2007); Bill Kirchner, A Miles Davis

Reader (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997); Eric
Nisenson, ‘Round About Midnight: A Portrait of Miles Davis (New York:
Dial Press, 1982); Victor Svorinich, Listen to This: Miles Davis and Bitches
Brew (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015); John F. Szwed, So
What: The Life of Miles Davis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002); Paul
Tingen, Miles Beyond: The Electric Explorations of Miles Davis, 1967–1991
(New York: Billboard Books, 2001); Ken Vail, Miles’ Diary: The Life of
Miles Davis 1947–1961 (London: Sanctuary Pub., 1996); Robert Walser,
“Out of Notes: Signification, Interpretation, and the Problem of Miles
Davis,” The Musical Quarterly 77.2 (Summer, 1993): 343–365; Keith
Waters, The Studio Recordings of the Miles Davis Quintet, 1965–68 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Richard Williams, Miles Davis: The
Man in the Green Shirt (New York: H. Holt, 1993), Richard Williams, The
Blue Moment: Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue and the Remaking of Modern Music
(London: Faber, 2009); Jeremy Yudkin, Miles Davis, Miles Smiles, and the
Invention of Post Bop (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).
13. Brad Tolinski and Alan Di Perna, Play It Loud: An Epic History of the Style,
Sound, and Revolution of the Electric Guitar (Toronto: Doubleday Canada,
2016).
14. Joy Jordan-Lake, Whitewashing Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Nineteenth-Century
Women Novelists Respond to Stowe (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University
Press, 2005); Jo-Ann Morgan, Uncle Tom’s Cabin as Visual Culture
(Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2007).
15. Colin Harper, Bathed in Lightning: John McLaughlin, the 60s, and the
Emerald Beyond (London: Jawbone Press: Distributed by Hal Leonard
Corporation, 2014); Walter Kolosky, Follow Your Heart: John McLaughlin
Song by Song: A Listener’s Guide (Cary, NC: Abstract Logix Books, 2010);
Alyn Shipton, Jazz Makers: Vanguards of Sound (Oxford; New York:
Oxford University Press, 2002); Paul Stump, Go Ahead John: The Music of
John McLaughlin (London: SAF Publishing Ltd., 1999); Ken Trethewey,
John McLaughlin: The Emerald Beyond (Jazz-Fusion Books, 2013).
16. Michael Dregni, Django: The Life and Music of a Gypsy Legend (Oxford;
New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Michael Dregni, Gypsy Jazz: In
Search of Django Reinhardt and the Soul of Gypsy Swing (New York: Oxford
University Press, USA, 2010); Michael Dregni, Alain Antonietto, Anne
Legrand, and David Reinhardt, Django Reinhardt and the Illustrated
History of Gypsy Jazz (Denver, CO: Speck Press, 2006); Benjamin Marx
Givan, The Music of Django Reinhardt (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2010); Jean-Louis Pautrot, “Music and Memory in Film and Fiction:
Listening to Nuit et brouillard (1955), Lacombe Lucien (1973) and La
Ronde de Nuit (1969),” Dalhousie French Studies 55 (Summer 2001):
168–182; Ioana Szeman, “‘Gypsy Music’ and Deejays: Orientalism,

Balkanism, and Romani Musicians,” TDR (1988) 53.3 (Fall, 2009):
98–116; Paul Vernon, Jean “Django” Reinhardt: A Contextual Bio-
Discography 1910–1953 (Aldershot, Hampshire; Burlington, VT: Ashgate,
2003).
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22 A. LEFKOVITZ
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CHAPTER 2
“I Don’t Want to Be a Clown Anymore”:

Jimi Hendrix as Racialized Freak
and Black-Transnational Icon
Abstract This chapter connects Hendrix to black-transnational vernacu-

lar traditions, a legacy of visual-cultural racial stereotypes, the sociology of
racialized popular music, and multiple popular music histories. It high-
lights Hendrix’s place in a legacy of Hollywood racial, gender, and sexual
caricatures and ways that, as the Civil Rights Movement gained steam,
such African-American artists as Hendrix grew more politically aware as
their music resonated with self-assertion. This chapter emphasizes
Hendrix’s magnetic stage presence and image, assimilating into, while
radically resisting mid-twentieth-century US and transnational racial codes
and conventions by performing the role of a “circus freak,” exploiting
Hendrix’s racialized, gender, and sexual difference, in an assortment of
onstage visual spectacles and in his globally-routed image. The most char-
ismatic in-concert performer of his generation, Hendrix’s onstage antics,
smashing and burning his guitar, playing the guitar with his teeth, with
one hand, behind his back, and between his legs, had overtly sexual impli-
cations and continued US and international freak-show legacies.
Keywords Freak Culture • Bob Dylan • Racialized Popular Music

• Minstrelsy • Great Migration
In musical and extra-musical terms, Jimi Hendrix’s racial significance links

to twentieth-century black-transnational border crossings, when African-

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77013-0_2
26 A. LEFKOVITZ
Americans made economic and politically influenced moves from the rural
South to the West, Midwest, and Northern “land of hope” as part of the
early-twentieth-century “Great Migration”,1 while others, in an effort to
leave US Jim Crow racial oppression and discover alternative racial ontolo-
gies and epistemologies, traveled to the Soviet Union, Turkey, France, and
especially Paris, a city that for some provided a welcome escape.2
Hendrix’s sojourn in London, a city with its own racially problematic
past and present, offered the performer, a racial outcast and exile, a type of
freedom amidst the city’s assortment of mods and other hipsters. His
racialized, “freakish” exoticism, consumed by rock’s “aristocracy”
(Townshend, Clapton, etc.), who had just previously co-opted the African-
and African-American-derived blues for their career enhancement, and the
image of the light-skinned yet no less racialized Hendrix smoking pot, his
Afro haircut out of sync with others’ more assimilationist expressions, pro-
vided a persistent reminder of rock’s racial roots as well as an exoticized
distraction from the economic and political oppressions underlying the
music’s subversive histories.
Hendrix was one of the multiple well-known figures in twentieth-
century black-transnational histories transversing historical time and inter-
national space in search of racial, gender, and sexual emancipation. His
black-transnational biography echoes the millions of those from the bot-
tom up, from the Global South to North, First to Second to Third and
Fourth Worlds, similarly traveling across the Atlantic and beyond as part
of the century’s horrors, displacements, and yearnings for economic
opportunities and political liberty.
As part of his centrality to black-transnational visual-cultural and popu-
lar musical histories, Hendrix links to such figures as Frederick Douglass
(1818?–1895), one of the nineteenth century’s most eminent human
rights leaders and most eloquent of ex-slaves. Douglass’s oratorical and
literary brilliance placed him in the forefront of the US abolition move-
ment, and he became the first black citizen to hold high rank in the US
government. Hendrix also links to the black transnationalism and racial
non-conformity of Ralph Ellison (1914–1994), an African-American
writer who won eminence with his first novel (and the only one published
during his lifetime), Invisible Man (1952),3 and Bob Marley (1945–1981),
the Jamaican singer-songwriter whose thoughtful, ongoing distillation of
early ska, rocksteady, and reggae musical forms merged in the 1970s into
“I DON’T WANT TO BE A CLOWN ANYMORE”: JIMI HENDRIX… 27
an electrifying rock-influenced hybrid that transformed him into a trans-

national superstar and anti-colonial symbol.4
Claimed by multiple racial groups, Hendrix, Douglass, Ellison, and
Marley lived on transnational racial frontiers. Their multiple, transgressive
interactions with mixed racial audiences made them key figures in an inter-
racial consciousness. Hendrix, a racially exotic, extra-terrestrial, interstitial,
Voodoo, Gypsy, and “freakish” figure; Douglass, an abolitionist who criti-
cized black racialism; Ellison, the author of Invisible Man, a landmark of
US and black-transnational literature; and Marley, a musician whose alle-
giance was to “God’s side, who cause me to come from black and white,”
illustrate how notions of race have been constructed out of a repression of
the interracial. Challenging the pieties and essentialism of identity politics,
“integrative ancestors” Hendrix, Douglass, Ellison, and Marley’s expres-
sions can be interpreted as articulations of liberation, as each ventured
beyond race’s ontological, epistemological, and national confines.5
Just as it was central to Hendrix’s globally circulated image and gender
and sexual identities, race played a key role in the making of black men in
the British West Indies, as the ideal of a “transnational blackness” emerged
in the work of early-twentieth-century radical black-transnational intel-
lectuals Marcus Garvey (1887–1940), the charismatic leader who orga-
nized the first important US black nationalist movement (1919–1926),
based in New York City’s Harlem, Claude McKay (1889–1948), the
Jamaican-born poet and novelist whose Home to Harlem (1928) was the
most popular novel written by an African-American to that time, and
C.L.R. James (1901–1989), the West Indian-born cultural historian,
cricket writer, and political activist who was a leading figure in the Pan-
African movement. Garvey, McKay, and James developed ideas of a trans-
national racial movement and federated global black political alliance
criss-crossing national borders. As geopolitical and historical events gave
rise to these writers’ intellectual investment in new modes of black-
transnational political self-determination, each engaged with African-
Americans’ fate in the burgeoning US empire, became disillusioned with
the potential of post-World War I transnational organizations, such as the
League of Nations, to acknowledge the material conditions of non-white
peoples around the world, and were inspired by the October Revolution,
also called the Bolshevik Revolution (October 24–25, 1917), the second
and last major phase of the Russian Revolution, in which the Bolshevik
Party seized power, inaugurating the Soviet regime.
28 A. LEFKOVITZ
In models of racial, gender, and sexual revolution and belonging not

based on nationality, a black-transnational political consciousness was
constituted by radical and reactionary impulses. Garvey, McKay, and
James saw freedom of movement as the basis of black transnationalism.
The Caribbean archipelago, ideally suited to the free movement of black
subjects across national borders, became the metaphoric heart of their
vision. As Garvey, McKay, and James were influenced by ideas of milita-
rism, empire, and male sovereignty shaping early-twentieth-century
transnational political discourses, their vision of transnational blackness
excluded women’s political subjectivities. In a remapping of the Atlantic
world by its traveling, black-transnational subjects, contrasting, radical
West-Indian intellectuals Garvey, McKay, and James shaped the geopo-
litical realities of the modern and modernizing world, refusing to be lim-
ited by national identities’ historical terms, conditions, discourses, and
hegemonies. Responding to the interconnections of citizenship, nation,
diaspora, race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, freedom, migrancy, and
transnationalism, each used geography to remap early-twentieth-century
black nationalism beyond the nation-state’s borders and imagined black
transnationalism extending from the Western Hemisphere to Africa,
Europe, and elsewhere.6
Hendrix and Transnational “Freak Show” Traditions

Assimilating into, while radically resisting mid-twentieth-century US racial
codes and conventions, by performing the role of a “racialized freak” in an
assortment of onstage visual spectacles, Hendrix became the most charis-
matic in-concert performer of his generation. In contrast to such “guitar
gods” as Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, and Eddie Van
Halen, but similar to additional black-transnational public figures, “freak-
ishness” was central to Hendrix’s persona, not only as a racialized rock
anomaly, but as a type of sideshow figure whose performances created an
image that rested on nineteenth-century US cultural traditions of blackface
minstrelsy7 and broader freak-show performances, enabling the US public
to demarcate lines between normal and deviant, us and them, and freak and
non-freak.
Echoing Little Richard, with his flamboyance, Chuck Berry and his
“duck walk,” and Nat “King” Cole (1919–1965), the African-American
musician remembered as one of the best and most influential pianists and
small-group leaders of the swing era, who achieved his greatest commercial
success as an exquisitely voiced vocalist specializing in warm ballads and

light swing,8 as well as other black-transnational performers, part of the
appeal of Hendrix’s stylized and hyper-sexualized performances and out-
rageous persona was the radical difference they entailed. An exotic racial
pariah who could be safely consumed from a distance by a white audience,
Hendrix’s freakish image corresponded to the 1960s counterculture,
which appropriated the term “freak” and used it as a badge of honor in
much the same way the gay population appropriated the term queer. For
example, folk singer-songwriter Arlo Guthrie commented about “a lot of
freaks” from the stage at Woodstock, dialogue from the iconic 1960s
countercultural film Easy Rider (1969) highlights ways the characters
“love to freak,” and Hendrix himself declared that he was going to wave
his “freak flag” in his song “If 6 was 9” (1967).
Hendrix’s onstage antics and outrageous showmanship, smashing and
burning his guitar, playing the guitar with his teeth, with one hand, behind
his back, and between his legs (his handling of his guitar was overtly sexual
and he sometimes brought his act to an end by setting fire to the instru-
ment), highlight the unusual racial dynamics of his group, The Jimi
Hendrix Experience, made up of an African-American guitarist and singer
leading a white rhythm section in a reversal of rock’s exploitation of black
popular music, with white singers in the foreground. Disturbing fixed late-
1960s racial meanings and practices in rock music and broader US and
transnational popular cultures, Hendrix was unique in that he acted as a
bridge between rock’s black-transnational roots and co-optation by “white
bluesman” who took the blues and, as one critic commented with regards
to Led Zeppelin, put them on steroids.
Hendrix’s exotic and “freakish” racialized image, based in part on his
“Voodoo” and Gypsy personas, fed his image as a racial other who brought
rock music back to its “authentic” racial and blues roots even as the price
of his fame was to parade onstage as a sideshow, racialized “freak” (resting
on US and transnational popular cultural legacies). In 1964, as he moved
to New York and was hired by the Isley Brothers, who encouraged his
taste for flamboyant costumes and his exhibitionist performing routine,
Hendrix began experimenting with feedback, fuzz, and distortion of
sound through high volume levels and other electronic effects.
Though Hendrix, tiring of the wild man image that brought him ini-
tial attention, was perceived as reserved by spectators anticipating gim-
mickry, on tour, Hendrix’s trademark Fender Stratocaster and Marshall
Amplifier were punished nightly, as Hendrix’s trio enhanced its reputation
30 A. LEFKOVITZ
with exceptional live shows. Hendrix drew on black-transnational culture

and his performative background to produce a startling visual-cultural
and aural spectacle. With his Afro haircut signifying a subversion of racial
respectability politics, echoing the styles of Angela Davis, Jesse Jackson,
and others, an assortment of technical possibilities, such as distortion,
feedback, and sheer volume brought texture to his approach. Hendrix’s
assault was enhanced by his flamboyant stage persona, in which he used
the guitar as a physical appendage. Such practices as playing his instru-
ment behind his back, between his legs, or on the floor in simulated sex-
ual ecstasy brought criticism from radical quarters, who claimed the artist
had become an “Uncle Tom,” employing these tricks to ingratiate him-
self with the white audience. However, these accusations overlooked
similar showmanship from generations of black-transnational performers,
from Charley Patton (c. 1887/91–1934), the African-American blues
singer-guitarist and among the earliest and most influential Mississippi
blues performers, to T-Bone Walker (1910–1975), the African-American
songwriter and major modern blues figure.9
Hendrix was the first important electric guitar soloist in the blues and
one of the most influential players in the genre’s histories. As a bluesman
and student of the tradition, from down-home Delta stylings to sophisti-
cated urban forms, Hendrix had a deep connection to his blues roots and
performed daring experimental interpretations of the idiom. Hendrix’s
“Catfish Blues” evoked blues elders Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson
(c. 1911–1938), composer, guitarist, and singer whose eerie falsetto sing-
ing voice and rhythmic slide guitar influenced his contemporaries and later
blues and rock musicians.10 Hendrix’s abstract chord changes heard in
“Jelly 292,” a parody of classic urban blues lines, such as “After Hours”
and “Sweet Home Chicago,” scratched the surface of his talent. The blues
format offered Hendrix possibilities for experimentation, especially heard
in “Red House” (1967), in which Hendrix reinterprets the standard
12-bar blues.
Hendrix’s racialized, “freakish” image contributed to his identity as an
anomaly in the canon of rock icons, and his onstage experimentations and
unconventional image placed him in a legacy of US and transnational
freak-show traditions. Images of the freak show, a staple of nineteenth-
and early-twentieth-century US and transnational popular cultures, com-
bined the grotesque, horrific, and amusing. Reappearing in literature and
the arts, in the turn from live entertainment to more mediated forms of
cultural expression, images of the freak and freak shows continued due to
their capacity for reinvention. Devoid of inherent, fixed meanings, the

freak became a stage for playing out pressing political and cultural con-
cerns, from debates and anxieties about race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity,
class, nation, empire, and immigration to controversies over taste and
public standards of decency.
Freak shows mixed terror and fascination for their audiences, as an
assortment of actors sought fame and profit in the business of human
exhibition. Metaphors for questions about self and other and identity and
difference, freak shows provide a window into a once-vital form of popular
culture, even as they have been revived in the late-twentieth- and early-
twenty-first centuries, seen in films and on television and heard in various
forms of popular music. Celebrated by some, the freak show’s return has
been less welcome to those who have traditionally been its victims, as freak
shows function as forms of living histories and testament to the vibrancy,
inventiveness, exploitation, and violence of US and transnational popular
cultures and their capacity for cruelty and injustice.
Offering hidden pleasures for audiences, seeing their most private
nightmares and intimate desires on public display, common perceptions of
the “freak” include carnival performers, people with physiological disabili-
ties, hippies, people who blur racial, gender, sexual, and ethnic conven-
tions, and those from non-Western cultures. Providing distorted visions
and metaphors of viewers’ inner fears and marketing “otherness” and
dominant cultures’ “dark sides,” freak shows include such diverse phe-
nomena as Carson McCullers’ use of “freaks” as a symbol of non-
conformist sexuality in his novel The Member of the Wedding (1946), Diane
Arbus’s disturbing photography, the treatment of freakishness in Toni
Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) and Beloved (1987), an early-twentieth-
century Batwa Pygmy from Central Africa named Ota Benga who shared
a cage with an orangutan at the Bronx Zoo, and the enduring figure of the
Hottentot Venus (before 1790–1815), the most well-known of at least
two Khoikhoi women who, due to their large buttocks, were exhibited as
freak-show attractions in nineteenth-century Europe.11 Additional cul-
tural artifacts include Tod Browning’s landmark 1932 film Freaks,
Katherine Dunn’s 1983 novel Geek Love, and the films Bloodsucking Freaks
(1976), Eight Legged Freaks (2002), Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s
Assistant (2009), and The Greatest Showman (2017), starring Hugh
Jackman as P.T. Barnum (1810–1891), who employed sensational forms
of presentation and publicity to popularize such amusements as the public
32 A. LEFKOVITZ
museum, the musical concert, and the three-ring circus, and, in partner-
ship with James A. Bailey, made the US circus a popular and gigantic spec-
tacle, the so-called Greatest Show on Earth.12
As postmodern counterculture attempted to reclaim the idea of the
freak, Jennifer Miller, head of Circus Amok, called herself a woman with a
beard, not a “bearded lady,” and gave feminist lectures during her act. A
sociology of deviance and cultural historical analyses of enfreakment and
freak shows includes the social construction and spectacular display of
wondrous, monstrous, and curious Otherness in Continental Europe.
Freak-show celebrities, medical specimens, and philosophical fantasies
presenting the anatomically unusual occurred in a wide range of sites,
including curiosity cabinets, anatomical museums, and traveling circus
acts. Local dimensions of the exhibition of extraordinary bodies are under-
stood in their historical, cultural, and political contexts, including the
impact of the Nazi eugenics programs, state Socialism, and the Chernobyl
catastrophe. Enfreakment’s additional transnational dimensions range
from Jesuit missionaries’ diabolization of Native Americans, translations
of Continental European teratology in British medical journals, and
Hollywood films’ colonization of European fantasies about deformity.
Continental European freaks are introduced as products of ideologi-
cally infiltrated representations and emerge as subjects endowed with their
own voice, view, and subversive agency. In a geographical area from
Germany and France to Ukraine and Russia, “freakish” difference was
represented in textual and visual cultures of Continental Europe from the
Medieval Period through the late-twentieth century, pertaining to issues
of physical difference and disability.13
“Freaks” captivated the mass imagination since before the nineteenth
century. In Victorian England, the freak show was mainstream and subver-
sive. Spectacles of strange, exotic, and titillating bodies attracted
nineteenth-century English middle-class audiences, while souvenir por-
traits of performing freaks could be seen in Victorian family albums. Freak-
show imagery and practices shocked Victorian sensibilities and generated
controversies concerning the boundaries of physical normalcy and moral-
ity in entertainment. Freak shows’ marketing tactics made use of ideologi-
cal assumptions concerning compulsory female domesticity and British
imperial authority and reflected these ideas with a surreal distortion.
Popular fiction written for middle-class Victorian readers called upon
imagery of extreme physical difference, and strange-bodied characters of
nineteenth-century fiction raised questions about relationships between

physical difference and the social expectations shaping Victorian culture.
Freak-show imagery can be found in Victorian popular fiction, in the
works of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Guy de Maupassant, Florence
Marryat, and Lewis Carroll. Despite nineteenth-century impulses to
demarcate normalcy, images of radical physical differences are framed in
somewhat empowering ways in Victorian fiction, featuring dwarves, fat
people, and bearded ladies. These images shift the meanings of works’
plots and characters, providing satires of the nineteenth-century treatment
of the poor and disabled, and presenting alternative traits and behaviors to
restrictive social norms. Connections between freak shows and fiction’s
response to middle-class ideals for women and girls include images of posi-
tively encoded difference, such as the exaggerated nurturance of Dickens’s
fat women and traditionally male strength of Collins’s and Marryat’s
bearded ladies, moving Victorian ideology toward more inclusive and flex-
ible gender and sexual roles.14
Victorians consumed shows featuring dancing dwarves, bearded ladies,
“missing links,” and six-legged sheep. This period was described as the
epoch of “consolidation” for freakery, an era of social change, enormously
popular freak shows, and taxonomic frenzy. In the unstable and conflict-
ing ways freakery was understood and deployed, figures included Daniel
Lambert, “King of the Fat Men,” Julia Pastrana, “The Bear Woman,” and
Laloo, “The Marvellous Indian Boy” and his embedded, parasitic twin.
The production of the freak could be read in the context of capitalist con-
sumption, the medical community, and politics of empire, as freakery
engaged with notions of normalcy in a Victorian setting. “Freaks” were
represented as victims of cultural prejudices and agents negotiating their
subjectivity through the performance and manipulation of cultural codes
regarding deviance and normalcy.15
In US histories, freaks, as human oddities, assumed the assigned role of
anomalous other. Freak shows offered spectators an icon of bodily other-
ness whose difference from audiences secured their membership in a com-
mon US identity that was by comparison ordinary, compliant, and normal.
Articulations of the freak in literary, textual, and visual-cultural discourses
include relocations of freak shows and theoretical analyses of freak culture;
public presentations of natives; 1840s laughing-gas demonstrations;
Shirley Temple and Tom Thumb; Coney Island bug-eating denizens;
Myrtle Corbin, the four-legged woman; the Two-Headed Giant; tribal
non-Westerners; the very fat, thin, and hirsute; hermaphrodites; the
34 A. LEFKOVITZ
disabled; Siamese twins Chang and Eng Bunker; Eli Bowen, the legless
acrobat; Prince Randian, the human torso; fire eaters; sword swallowers;
glass eaters; human blockheads; bodybuilders as postmodern freaks; freaks
in Star Trek; Michael Jackson’s identification with the Elephant Man; and
the contemporary talk show as a reconfiguration of the freak show.16
Hendrix and a Legacy of Visual-Cultural Racial

Representations
Visual culture was central in proliferating Hendrix’s role as a racialized
freak. In this way, Hendrix was part of a legacy of ways popular media and
the power and politics of the image contribute to widespread myths and
misunderstandings about race. The racialized confluence of visual culture
and popular music notes how beliefs about race and racial representations
are constructed.17 From disparaging images of Hollywood’s early years to
subtler archetypes developed for non-white characters and broader charac-
ter patterns for whites, referred to as prototypes, discriminatory patterns
in “post-racial” US culture note “blind spots” in white people’s lives, as
racial ideologies have been filtered through mainstream mass media.18
Cinematic representations of African-Americans became fixed images,
with strict rules for how they should be depicted. These limited and under-
informed images could not be challenged or transformed until power rela-
tions in the US film industry began to change, affording African-Americans
opportunities to tell stories and present alternative racial realities and
representations.19
From D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915)20 to Spike Lee’s
Malcolm X (1992), the commercial film industry reflects white domina-
tion of the US and challenges to hegemonic racial representations and
narratives. African Americans protested images of black people as crimi-
nals, servants, comics, athletes, and sidekicks, though these images persist
despite demands for emancipated racial representations and roles in the
industry. While racist portrayals in early films were supplanted by more
appealing depictions, stereotypes continue in explicit and implicit forms,
seen in Blaxploitation films,21 a genre made mostly in the early to mid-
1970s featuring black actors in an effort to appeal to black urban audi-
ences. Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) is
usually considered the first of many black-themed films presenting alterna-
tive images of African-Americans.
With a resubordination of black people in Reagan-era films,22 in such

products as Soul Man (1986) with its updated blackface minstrelsy, con-
troversies surrounded role choices by such stars as Eddie Murphy, Whoopi
Goldberg, and Richard Pryor. African-Americans resisted Hollywood’s
one-dimensional images and superficial selling of black culture as the latest
fad by engaging in strategies of parody and other ways to defy controlling
images.
African-American cultural producers gained the cinematic means of
production to tell their own stories and represent themselves in more
emancipatory ways, while still under the guise of capitalistic hegemony,
the camera’s mechanical eye, and the surveillance culture permeating US
and transnational locales. Organizing demonstrations and boycotts, writ-
ing, and creating their own cinematic images have been forms of resis-
tance, as was the artistic and commercial breakthrough of black independent
filmmakers, using films to channel their rage at economic, political, and
cultural injustice. Diverse approaches to depicting African-American
culture include innovative tactics for financing cultural producers’ work.
African-Americans acquired the power of framing blackness, once white
Hollywood’s exclusive domain.23
In the star vehicles of Paul Robeson (1898–1976), the celebrated
African-American singer, actor, and activist, and Sidney Poitier, the
Bahamian-American actor, director, and producer who crossed the color
line in the US film industry, made the careers of other black actors possi-
ble, and was the first African-American to win an Academy Award for best
actor (for Lilies of the Field [1963]), and Lee Daniels’s directorial forays in
such films as Precious (2009) and Lee Daniels’ The Butler (2013), black
film stars and directors highlight constancies and shifts in racial, gender,
sexual, class, national, and transnational representational regimes.24
Such films as Sapphire (1959), Leo the Last (1969), Black Joy (1977),
Playing Away (1986), and Mona Lisa (1987) note films’ multiple por-
trayals of black female sexuality and the extent to which black filmmakers
challenge stereotypes.25 African-American actresses, from Madame Sul-
Te-Wan, a pioneering African-American actress of the silent era, to Ethel
Waters (1896/1900–1977), an African-American blues and jazz singer
and dramatic actress whose singing, based in the blues tradition, featured
her full-bodied voice, wide range, and slow vibrato (a pulsating effect,
produced in singing by the rapid reiteration of emphasis on a tone),26
verify and contest prevailing racial representations, noting the confluence
36 A. LEFKOVITZ
and discrepancies of on- and off-screen depictions and black versus white
stardom.
Racial cultural politics informed African-American actresses’ choices
and roles, as their stardom was refracted by the socio-cultural and political
status of women and black people in the US. Cinema operated as a form
of thought control and vehicle of a shared system of beliefs and values,
capable of producing alternative visions. Through cinematic culture, emo-
tional relations to race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and nation were
confirmed, along with aspects of US self-imagination and black femme
desire.
Aesthetically, politically, culturally, and historically significant, the doc-
umentary form revealed the interconnected consequences of racial hierar-
chies, global capitalism, and neoliberalism.27 Documentaries expose
economic, political, and cultural forces shaping African-Americans’ lives,
seen from their perspectives. Illuminating various aspects of US culture in
rich and varied works in film, video, and new electronic media, documen-
taries represent multiple impressions of black life, including views of sig-
nificant events and portraits of charismatic individuals. Documentary
footage depicts the moments when civil rights protestors were attacked by
state troopers, when Malcolm X delivered a captivating speech, when
Betty Carter (1930–1998), a jazz singer best remembered for the scat and
other musical interpretations showcasing her vocal flexibility, performed a
heart-wrenching song, and show Langston Hughes (1902–1967), an
African-American writer who was an important Harlem Renaissance figure
and who made African-American experiences the subject of his writings,
ranging from poetry and plays to novels and newspaper columns.28
Struggles over racial representations characterize documentary films. In
an urgent desire to convey racial realities, countering uninformed and dis-
torted depictions circulating in the mass media, on film, and in television,
African-American documentaries were long associated with the fight for
political and cultural empowerment. For filmmakers, documentary was a
powerful mode through which to represent alternative depictions of
African-American realities and critiques of dominant discourses. Politically
minded filmmakers view documentary as a tool with which to interrogate
and reinvent histories, as their work fills gaps, corrects errors, and exposes
distortions, offering counter-hegemonic narratives of African-American
experiences. Variations in black-transnational documentary forms include
Afro-Diasporic documentaries and documentaries centering African-
American military experiences.29
When a triple crown of Academy Awards was awarded to Denzel

Washington, Halle Berry, and Sidney Poitier on a single evening in 2002,
a turning point for African-Americans in cinema seemed to have been
achieved. While it was hyped as such by the media, quick to overlook the
superficiality of this embrace, 15 years later, Halle Berry revealed her
award “meant nothing” due to Hollywood’s, and US culture’s, failure to
address what W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963), the African-American soci-
ologist and most important black protest leader in the US during the first
half of the twentieth century, who shared in the creation of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909,
edited The Crisis, its magazine, from 1910 to 1934, and identified with
communist causes later in life, called the twentieth- (and twenty-first)-
century problem of the color line. The 2002 Oscars can be understood as
a jumping-off point from which to discuss the state of twenty-first-century
African-American cinema and the various subgenres composing it.
Looking at such films as Love and Basketball (2000), Antwone Fisher
(2002), Training Day (2001), and the Barbershop films, all of which were
written, directed, and starred black artists, issues of racial, gender, sexual,
and class representations and opportunities in contemporary cinema arise.
As these and additional films walk a line between confronting racial
stereotypes and trafficking in them, earning a great deal of money while
hardly playing to white audiences, they address mythologies of the
“American Dream,” racial progress, gender, sexual, ethnic, class, and
national differences, and contrasts between grotesque historic images and
those defining more recent films. The consistency of images across genre,
era, and transnational place reflects white supremacy’s lasting influence
and black people’s responses to it, with images reflecting racial progress
and perpetuating racial inequalities and white privilege.30
The rise of cinema as the predominant form of US entertainment
around the turn of the twentieth century coincided with the Great
Migration. By the Great Depression, the African-American population
had become primarily urban, transforming individual lives and urban
cultures. Urban settings became a basic characteristic of African-American
films as black people became more firmly rooted in urban spaces and visi-
ble as historical and political subjects. “The city” became more than a
frequent setting or theme in racialized films. It functioned as a central
organizing trope in the articulation of black economic, political, and cul-
tural progress, protest, and subjectivities.31
38 A. LEFKOVITZ
In early relationships between US racial dynamics and cinema, African-

American migrations proliferated onto the screen, into the audience, and
behind the camera. African-American urban populations and cinema
shaped one another, including silent-era black Chicago film culture, the
earliest silent films of Oscar Micheaux (1884–1951), the prolific African-
American producer and director who made films independently of the
Hollywood film industry from the silent era until 1948,32 other early “race
films” made for African-American audiences, and the ways African-
Americans staked their claim in cinema’s development as an art and cul-
tural institution. African-American histories were constructed through
film, reflecting the Great Migration’s economic, political, and cultural
transitions.
Racial cinematic representations can be understood as a political and
cultural negotiation between film as art, commodity, and the multiple dis-
courses surrounding racial meanings, interpretations, and struggles. This
challenges expectations that black film can or should represent realities of
black life and addresses an assortment of economic, political, and cultural
issues. Black film exists alongside literature, music, art, photography, new
media, and visual culture more broadly as a form mixing black visual,
sonic, and expressive cultures. Examples of black film’s multiple roles and
manifestations include the racial grotesque in Ralph Bakshi’s Coonskin
(1975), black performativity in Wendell B. Harris, Jr.’s Chameleon Street
(1989), blackness and noir in Bill Duke’s Deep Cover (1992), and how
place and desire impact blackness in Barry Jenkins’s Medicine for Melancholy
(2008). Each of these films represents a distinct conception of relationships
between race and cinema while recasting the idea of what constitutes an
authentic “black film.”
With producers, festival organizers, critics, pundits, and scholars over-
determining works by black artists, insisting on their representation of a
fixed, predetermined definition of blackness, multiple ways of enacting
and expressing black culture proliferate, many of which have yet to be
imagined and realized.33 Films and filmmakers of the Los Angeles
Rebellion, a group of African, Caribbean, and African-American indepen-
dent film and video artists that formed at the University of California, Los
Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s, including Charles Burnett, Julie Dash,
Haile Gerima, Billy Woodberry, Jamaa Fanaka, and Zeinabu Irene Davis,
shared a desire to create alternatives to dominant modes of narrative,
style, and practice in US cinema. Their works reflect the complexities of
black experiences and roles played by the L.A. Rebellion within black
visual culture and postwar Los Angeles art histories. The network of these
filmmakers highlights black cinema, and US and transnational cinema’s
challenges, possibilities, and responsibilities.34
From Al Jolson (1886–1950), the popular US singer and comedian of
the musical stage and screen, in blackface to Disney’s Song of the South
(1946),35 featuring the kindly African-American storyteller and stereotype
of Uncle Remus, histories of racial representations on-screen are long and
varied. In the 1930s, film studios self-censored their releases, removing
racially offensive language like the “N-word.” Censorship stemmed from
concerns about boycotts from civil rights groups and a loss of revenue
from African-American filmgoers. Black audiences, activists, and lobbyists
influenced racial cinematic representations before the Civil Rights
Movement. These were shaped by a set of negotiations between individu-
als and influential institutions, from protest groups to state censorship
boards. Civil rights debates shaped films’ content and form, providing a
public forum for addressing such taboo subjects as interracial sexuality,
segregation, and lynching.36
Histories of the institutionally based politics of racial representations in
the classic studio era include film censorship and black film protests, reveal-
ing deep anxieties and destabilization of racial codes and conventions,
rather than stereotypical certainties.37 Early black film during the era of
mass migration and Jim Crow notes how, by embracing the new film
medium at the turn of the twentieth century, African-Americans forged a
collective, yet fraught, culture of freedom. African-Americans emerged as
pioneers of cinema from the 1890s to the 1920s. Across the South and
Midwest, films presented in churches, lodges, and schools raised money
and created shared cultural experiences for urban African-Americans. As
migrants moved north, bound for Chicago and New York, films moved
with them. Along these routes, ministers and reformers, preaching mes-
sages of racial uplift, used films as an enticement to attract followers.
Gaining popularity, black cinema became controversial. Fighting a losing
battle with movie houses, once-supportive ministers denounced the evils
of the “colored theater,” as on-screen images sparked debates over black
identities and priorities.
In 1910, when boxing champion Jack Johnson (1878–1946), the first
black boxer to win the world heavyweight championship and considered
one of the greatest heavyweights of all time, became the world’s first black
film star,38 cinematic representations emerged as central to black concerns
about racial progress. Black leaders demanded self-representation and an
40 A. LEFKOVITZ
end to cinematic mischaracterizations, which, they believed, violated

African-Americans’ civil rights. In 1915, these ideas led to the creation of
an industry producing “race films” by and for black audiences and spark-
ing the twentieth century’s first mass black protest movement.
Turn-of-the-twentieth-century African-American film cultures note
ways film was a central motivating force in the formation of racial identi-
ties and alliances in the Jim Crow era. Those involved were black church
leaders in the Midwest, heavily investing in film technology as a tool for
their ministries, embattled African-American theater owners in the segre-
gated South, and pioneers of African-American independent cinema at
home and abroad. Film transformed racial sensibilities and rural migrants
envisioned alternative meanings of freedom. Racial representations were
depicted in multiple ways, including films dramatizing African-Americans
as a politically and economically diverse group.39 African-American inde-
pendent filmmaking before and after World War II represented the unique
nature of African-American family, action, horror, female-centered, and
independent films, including Souls of Sin (1949), Bones (2001), and
Monster’s Ball (2001).40
While there have been few black filmmakers who control their own
work and who can “greenlight” a film in Hollywood, and few black
women behind the camera, black filmmakers moved from independent
production to the mainstream, while whites controlled racial imagery and
its transnational proliferation. Panoptic histories of African-Americans in
film include ways filmmakers were affected by changes in the film industry,
difficulty in raising money for production, compromises directors and
writers made to get funding, effects of sensationalistic images, 1980s and
early 1990s “hood films” and “gangsta” blockbusters, Hollywood’s dis-
criminatory employment practices, the black-owned Lincoln Motion
Picture Company, a US film production company founded in 1916 and
known as the first producer of “race movies,” the special concerns of black
female filmmakers, ways film distribution can be the greatest obstacle to
broad-based success for African-American feature filmmakers, film crews,
and cast members, and roles African Americans played—or did not play—
in all aspects of film since 1895.41
Treating art as a product in a system of economic relations, pitting one
group against another in the interest of economic gain, African-American
film histories include feature films, short subjects, soundies (short music
features that were the predecessors of music videos), trailers, films pro-
duced by the US government, independents, and black gay and lesbian
film. Economic, political, and cultural forces came to the fore in the era of
silent film and early “talkies,” as firmly entrenched and limited representa-
tions of African Americans revealed intellectual, political, and media rac-
ism present since the beginnings of US cinema. In the interwoven,
discursive currents of race, representation, social Darwinism, scientific rac-
ism, blackface minstrelsy, and modernism, black political and cultural
resistance to racial representational regimes occurred in US politics, media,
and cinema. As aesthetic, ideological, and moral challenges confronted
African-American filmmakers, debates over racial authenticity in main-
stream and independent African-American cinema were contested.
Since the earliest sound films, Hollywood studios and independent pro-
ducers of “race films” for black audiences created stories featuring African-
American religious practices. As films constructed images of
African-American religion, these representations reflected and contributed
to discourses about race, US citizenship’s cultural and moral require-
ments, and struggles over meanings of US racial identities.42
From the pioneering work of Oscar Micheaux and Wallace Thurman
(1902–1934), the African-American editor, critic, novelist, and playwright
associated with the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, to the Hollywood success
of John Singleton and Spike Lee,43 African-American filmmakers played a
key role in the development of independent and mainstream US cinema.
Corresponding to the work of early African-American filmmakers, an
African-American cinematic tradition developed, as did relations between
African-American filmmakers and filmmakers from the African Diaspora.
Issues included the nature of African-American cinematic aesthetics, art-
ists’ place within the subculture, representations of an African-American
imaginary, the construction of African-American sexuality on-screen, the
role of African-American women in independent cinema, African-American
female spectatorship, the significance of those African-American directors
who worked for Hollywood and those dismissed as “sell-outs,” the
Hollywood “master narrative,” and those “crossover” filmmakers whose
achievements entailed a covert infiltration of the studios.44
Dominant US film histories can be revised by recuperating the exten-
sive yet forgotten participation of early-twentieth-century African-
American film critics. Early critical writing on cinema exists by black
cultural critics, academics, journalists, poets, writers, and film fans. Sources
include black newspapers, magazines, scholarly and political journals,
monographs, black critical writing on early cinema during the era of offi-
cially sanctioned US racial segregation, and the press campaign against The
42 A. LEFKOVITZ
Birth of a Nation. From 1909, black newspapers produced celebratory

discourses about the cinema as a much-needed corrective to the predomi-
nance of theatrical blackface minstrelsy. Before the Birth of a Nation con-
troversy, the black press drew attention to the work of black film
entrepreneurs and callous commercial exploitation of lynching footage.
Film commentaries were produced during the “Roaring Twenties” Jazz
Age by such writers as W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale
Hurston. Additional pieces were written throughout the Great Depression
and pre- and post-World War II periods.45
Hendrix and the Sociology of Racialized

Popular Music
As Hendrix’s racialized “freakish” image and continued proliferation in
US and transnational visual cultures illuminate the central role of race and
racial representations in the power and politics of the image, Hendrix’s
mid-twentieth-century black-transnational biography and legacy note the
sociology of racialized popular music and race’s key influence in the devel-
opment and consumption of various popular music genres. From his
dissonant performance of the “Star Spangled Banner” at Woodstock to his
consistent transgression of fixed performative, racial, gender, and sexual
hierarchies, Hendrix was central to black popular music’s countercultural
identities, acting as a supplement to broader economic and political
struggles.
As diverse genres demonstrate ways black-transnational popular music
reflects political and cultural meanings and individual identities, descrip-
tions of subcultures explain the concepts of music sociology, including the
rituals linking people to music, the past, present, and each other. The
sociology and political, cultural, and transnational study of music offers a
broader perspective on Hendrix’s histories and popular music in the US
and beyond.46 Popular music illuminates political and cultural institutions,
theories, and sociological concepts. Music, a social phenomenon of great
interest, highlights subcultures’ realities and negotiations with the domi-
nant culture. Questions arise as to the extent that music affects major
social institutions, how music influences and has been influenced by key
sociological concepts, such as socialization, social interaction, groups and
organizations, deviance and social control, generational and economic
stratification, race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, nation, social change,
collective behavior and social movements, education, institutions (e.g.,

family and religion), and cultural imperialism and Americanization.
Relationships to music are part of an evolving cyclical process of self-
discovery and expression. Becoming cognizant of ways music functions in
people’s lives and influences thoughts and behaviors shows how music can
enliven understandings of sociological concepts.47 Acts of evaluation illu-
minate ways people construct social identities through music. As listening
becomes a social gesture, popular songs merit aesthetic judgments and
shape understandings of what music means. Categories of “high” and
“low” art, genres, and roles technology plays in music appreciation high-
light struggles over the meanings of music’s political aesthetics. Defining
music as a marketable commodity instead of a type of art, genres represent
markets rather than styles. Lyrics by such artists as Bob Dylan are imbued
with meanings as part of the musical experience and can be considered
poetic texts. As technological advances in recording blur distinctions
between artist, producer, and listener, music affects and reflects the social,
economic, and political climate and individual and cultural identities.48
Such traditions and concepts as minstrelsy, urbanization, hybridity, and
crossover are powerful tools for understanding popular music, as are the
complexities of the market and unmistakable, unforgivable blackness of
much popular music, even a presumably white form like country and west-
ern.49 In the rise of US popular music over the twentieth century, the
period in which the music came into its own and achieved transnational
popularity, a variety of genres developed. This includes Tin Pan Alley, aris-
ing in the late nineteenth century from the US song-publishing industry
in New York City,50 blues, jazz, gospel, R&B, rock and roll, folk, rap, and
Mexican-American corridos, popular narrative songs and poetry that form
ballads. Songs are often about oppression, histories, daily life for peasants,
and other socially relevant topics. Corridos remain a popular form in
Mexico and were widespread during the Nicaraguan Revolutions of the
twentieth century. The corrido mainly derives from the romance and con-
sists of a salutation from the singer and prologue to the story, the story
itself, and a moral and farewell from the singer. Forms created by one
group appeal to, and are influenced by, other groups transversing borders
of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, region, nation, and generation.
Popular music histories providing insights into relationships between
music, culture, and social identity denote popular recordings’ economic,
44 A. LEFKOVITZ
political, and cultural contexts.51 In the location of memories and histories

of popular music and its multiple pasts are different places in which popu-
lar music can be situated, including the local physical site, museum store-
room, exhibition space, digitized archive, and display space made possible
by the Internet.52 Forces that affect sonic encounters include the eco-
nomic, social, moral, and political preoccupations behind aesthetic taste.
Learning from musical experiences becomes vital to understanding music’s
role as a contributor to public debates about who people can be as indi-
viduals, groups, and nations. Approaches to musical biography and histo-
ries can lead to a rethinking of assumptions about cultural and philosophical
issues, including national identity and musical hybridities, material cul-
tures, economics of power, relationships between classical and popular,
and self-fashioning of modernists. This includes Vincent d’Indy
(1851–1931), a French composer and teacher, noted for his attempted,
and partially successful, reform of French symphonic and dramatic music,
Augusta Holmès (1847–1903), a French composer of Irish descent who
wrote the lyrics to almost all of her songs and oratorios, as well as the
libretto of her opera La Montagne Noire (1885) and the programmatic
poems for her symphonic poems, and John Cage (1912–1992), the US
avant-garde composer whose inventive compositions and unorthodox
ideas influenced mid- twentieth-century music. Categories of race, gen-
der, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and nation in the early twentieth century
resonate with twenty-first-century experiences, as music uses time and
constructs narratives, and “question-spaces” broaden the political and cul-
tural possibilities in which music functions.
Beautiful, cacophonous, reassuring, and incomprehensible music comes
alive as a bearer of ideas and practices offering deep insights into ways
people negotiate the world. Music can be a critical lens, used to highlight
critical cultural, historical, economic, political, transnational, and social
issues. Histories, theories, and criticisms of modernist and postmodernist
music note the contingencies and complexities of particular moments in
which music was conceived, created, performed, and heard, potentially
providing deeper interpretations of the world and developing multiple lay-
ers of awareness. In linear and non-linear contexts, music involves more
than sounds performers play. Resounding as a profound force in US and
transnational popular cultures, dialectical relationships between musical
and extra-musical phenomena illuminate music’s political significance.53
A major rock icon, Jimi Hendrix notes rock music’s challenges to hege-
monic orders based on race, gender, sexuality, class, nation, and generation.
Hendrix’s rock, as well as that of other musicians, played an integral role

in the formation of political cultures since the 1950s. Rock has been used
to encapsulate contrasting genres, such as pop, punk, hip hop, and blues.
Part of everyday life and the formation of identities in England, Finland,
Sweden, the US, and nation-states that used to be on the other side of the
Iron Curtain, such as the Czech Republic and Slovakia, rock music, eco-
nomics, politics, historic trends, and transnational societies are inter-
twined.54 Hendrix’s racialized rock histories illuminate the fact that rock’s
initial architects were African-American popular musicians, such as Little
Richard, Etta James (1938–2012), an R&B entertainer who became a
successful ballad singer, and Chuck Berry (1926–2017), the singer, song-
writer, and guitarist who was one of the most popular and influential per-
formers in R&B and rock and roll in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.55
While Hendrix electrified rock in the late 1960s, by the 1980s, rock
produced by African Americans no longer seemed to be “authentically”
black. Especially in the music industry, the prevailing view was that neither
black audiences, white audiences, nor black popular musicians had an inter-
est in “black rock.” However, in 1985, New York-based black popular
musicians and writers formed the Black Rock Coalition (BRC) to challenge
that notion and create outlets for black rock music. Under the BRC’s aus-
pices, musicians organized performances and produced recordings and
radio and television shows featuring black rock. Illuminating connections
between race, gender, sexuality, class, nation, music, identity, authenticity,
the power and limits of racially identified aesthetics in economic, political,
and cultural contexts, and the triumphs and struggles of such rock bands as
Screaming Headless Torsos, Bad Brains, Living Color, and Fishbone, for
nearly 20 years, members of the BRC broadened understandings of black-
transnational identities, masculinities, and culture through rock music.
Though rock and roll’s initial figures were African American, rock has
been coded as white. Rock’s whiteness depended on confining ideas of
blackness amidst struggles over the essentialization of racial identities.
Rock has been a musical culture disenfranchising, marginalizing, and
denying the existence of the vital contributions of African-American musi-
cians. This includes Meshell Ndegeocello, a singer-songwriter, rapper,
bassist, and vocalist credited with sparking the neo-soul movement, and
Thomas “Blind Tom” Wiggins (1849–1908), an African-American musi-
cal prodigy on the piano. Wiggins had numerous original compositions
published and a lengthy and largely successful performing career through-
out the US. During the nineteenth century, he was one of the best-known
46 A. LEFKOVITZ
US performing pianists. Although he lived and died before autism was

described, he is now regarded as an autistic savant. Struggles over rock’s
racial histories note ways musicians and listeners insert themselves into a
dominant narrative from which they have been excluded, centering issues
about the fixity and fluidity of market categories and racialized political
and cultural identities.56
By the time Hendrix died in 1970, the idea of a black man playing lead
guitar in a rock band seemed exotic. Yet ten years earlier, Chuck Berry and
Bo Diddley (1928–2008), a singer, songwriter, and guitarist who was one
of the most influential performers of rock music’s early period, were
among the most significant rock performers. Rock became “white” due to
the interplay of popular music and racial thought within the music indus-
try and in fans’ minds. Rooted in rhythm and blues pioneered by African-
American musicians, 1950s rock and roll was racially inclusive and attracted
listeners and performers across the color line. In the 1960s, rock and roll
gave way to rock, a musical ideal regarded as more serious, artistic, and the
province of white musicians. Decoding racial discourses distorting domi-
nant rock histories, ideas of “authenticity” blinded listeners to rock’s
interracial past.
According to the dominant narrative, the authentic white musician was
guided by an individual creative vision, whereas African-American musi-
cians were deemed authentic only when they stayed true to black traditions.
Serious rock became white when only white musicians could be original
without being accused of betraying their race. Juxtaposing the overlapping
cultural histories of Sam Cooke and Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin and Janis
Joplin, and Hendrix and the Rolling Stones challenges the racial catego-
ries oversimplifying understandings of the 1960s counterculture. From
Little Richard and Chuck Berry to The Dominoes, who had one of the
finest musical pedigrees of any 1940s R&B vocal group, rock’s racial his-
tories include interracial exchanges and debates over authenticity. This
includes Ike Turner (1931–2007), the R&B and soul performer and pro-
ducer who was best known for his work with Tina Turner, and Howlin’
Wolf (1910–1976), a blues singer and composer who was one of the prin-
cipal exponents of Chicago’s urban blues style.57
Despite its black-transnational roots, rock and roll became white, with
the Rolling Stones, a band in love with black music, helping to lead the
way to rock’s segregated future. This corresponded to histories of white
appropriations of black musical forms and a seemingly endless cycle of
cultural plunder, including blackface minstrel pioneer T.D. Rice

(1808–1860), a white US performer and playwright who performed
blackface and used African-American vernacular speech, song, and dance
to become one of the most popular minstrel-show entertainers of his era,
considered the “father of US minstrelsy,” whose act drew on aspects of
African-American culture and popularized them with a national, and later
transnational, audience. Rice’s “Jim Crow” persona was a racialized depic-
tion in accordance with contemporary Caucasian ideas of African-
Americans and their culture. The character was based on a folk trickster
named Jim Crow who was long popular among black slaves. Rice also
adapted and popularized a traditional slave song called “Jump Jim Crow.”58
To some, Hendrix was the latest step in a plot designed to eliminate
black people from rock music so that it might be recorded as a white cre-
ation and substantiate notions that, while rock may have had its begin-
nings among black people, it had its true flowering among whites, with
the best black artists studied as remarkable primitives who unconsciously
foreshadowed future developments. By the mid-1970s, young black
musicians who wanted to play songs by Led Zeppelin and Grand Funk
Railroad recalled being ridiculed by white and black peers. Back to the
Future (1985) featured a climactic sequence in which rock histories are
altered so that Chuck Berry’s “sound” is retroactively invented by a Van
Halen-obsessed white teenager. When Hendrix, one of the few black per-
formers whose place in rock music hagiography is entirely secure, died in
1970, one obituary described him as “a black man in the alien world of
rock.” Throughout Hendrix’s brief career, his race was an incessant topic
of fascination among fans. Even in the late 1960s, the exceptional and
exotic nature of Hendrix’s race confirmed a perception of rock music that
was quickly rendering blackness other, so much so that, at the time of his
death, the idea of a black man playing electric lead guitar was “alien,” cor-
responding to Hendrix’s “freakish” image, and in ways that would have
been inconceivable for Chuck Berry a few years earlier.
Rock and roll, a genre rooted in black traditions, many of whose earli-
est stars were black, came to be understood as the natural province of
whites during a decade marked by unprecedented levels of interracial aes-
thetic exchange, musical collaboration, and commercial crossover, as
many of the most famous moments of 1960s music are marked by inter-
racial fluidity, such as a young Bob Dylan transforming a nineteenth-
century anti-slavery anthem, “No More Auction Block for Me,” into
“Blowin’ in the Wind,” a song that would become one of the most
48 A. LEFKOVITZ
unforgettable musical works of the US civil rights era, the revolution of

Motown Records, in which an African-American entrepreneur created
the most successful black-owned business in the US despite the nation’s
deeply ingrained white supremacy, the inundation of groups from
England, most notably a quartet from Liverpool called the Beatles and a
quintet from London called the Rolling Stones, each of whom were pro-
ponents of African-American music and would soon hear their songs fre-
quently performed by the very musicians they idolized.59
Central to US and globally circulating racial visual-cultural representa-
tions and the sociology of racialized popular music, Hendrix’s stature as
a black-transnational musical innovator continues to grow. In addition to
the cultural contradictions Hendrix represented as a black performer
popular with a white audience, who excelled in a genre popularized by
whites yet rooted in a black popular musical tradition, Hendrix also trans-
versed borders within black culture. His sonic explorations with feedback
and distortion paralleled developments in the Free Jazz movement, an
approach to jazz improvisation without fixed rules, emerging during the
late 1950s, reaching its height in the 1960s, and remaining a major devel-
opment in jazz.60 Hendrix could also shift into the deepest Delta blues, a
language neglected by his black contemporaries. With his hippie trap-
pings and revolutionary approach to the electric guitar, Hendrix was an
anomaly on the US popular music scene. Recognition of his talent did
not occur until he performed in England. His black-transnational freakish
appearance, performance style, racialized image, and the racialized politi-
cal aesthetics of his popular music are central to his mid-twentieth-cen-
tury black-transnational biography and emphasize visual and popular
musical relationships to the cultural politics of race, gender, sexuality,
class, and nation.
Notes
1. Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s
Great Migration (New York: Random House, 2010); Joe William Trotter,
Jr., The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race,
Class, and Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
2. Christiann Anderson and Monique Y. Wells, Paris Reflections: Walks
Through African-American Paris (Blacksburg, VA: McDonald &
Woodward Pub. Co., 2002); Petrine Archer-Straw, Negrophilia: Avant-
Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (New York: Thames & Hudson,
2000); Jules-Rosette Bennetta, Black Paris: The African Writers’ Landscape

(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Brooke Lindy Blower,
Becoming Americans in Paris: Transatlantic Politics and Culture Between
the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Jennifer Anne
Boittin, Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-imperialism and
Feminism in Interwar Paris (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010);
Darlene Clark Hine, Trica Danielle Keaton, and Stephen Small, Black
Europe and the African Diaspora (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
2009); Alain-Philippe Durand, Black, Blanc, Beur: Rap Music and Hip-
Hop Culture in the Francophone World (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press,
2002); Michel Fabre, From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in
France, 1840–1980 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Andy Fry,
Paris Blues: African American Music and French Popular Culture, 1920–
1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Dana S. Hale, Races
on Display: French Representations of Colonized Peoples 1886–1940
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Brent Hayes Edwards,
The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black
Internationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); Trica
Keaton, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Tyler Stovall, eds., Black
France/France Noire: The History and Politics of Blackness (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2012); Theresa A. Leininger-Miller, New Negro Artists in
Paris: African American Painters and Sculptors in the City of Light, 1922–
1934 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001); Craig Lloyd,
Eugene Bullard, Black Expatriate in Jazz-Age Paris (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 2000); Heike Raphael-Hernandez, ed., Blackening Europe:
The African American Presence (New York: Routledge, 2004); William
Shack, Harlem in Montmartre: A Paris Jazz Story Between the Great Wars
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); T. Denean Sharpley-
Whiting, Bricktop’s Paris: African American Women in Paris Between the
Two World Wars (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015); Tyler
Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1996); Dominic Richard David Thomas,
Black France: Colonialism, Immigration, and Transnationalism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007); Charles Tshimanga, Ch.
Didier Gondola, and Peter J. Bloom, Frenchness and the African Diaspora:
Identity and Uprising in Contemporary France (Bloomington: Indiana
3. Ralph Ellison and John F. Callahan, The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison
(New York: Modern Library, 1995); Ralph Ellison, Maryemma Graham,
and Amritjit Singh, Conversations with Ralph Ellison (Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 1995); Ralph Ellison and Robert G. O’Meally, Living
with Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz Writings (New York: Modern Library,
50 A. LEFKOVITZ
2001); Alan Nadel, Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison and the American
Canon (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1988); Horace A. Porter,
Jazz Country: Ralph Ellison in America (Iowa City: University of Iowa
Press, 2001); Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2007); John S. Wright, Shadowing Ralph Ellison (Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 2006).
4. Hank Bordowitz, Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright: The Bob Marley
Reader (New York: Da Capo Press, 2004); Christopher John Farley, Before
the Legend: The Rise of Bob Marley (New York: Amistad, 2007); Vivien
Goldman, Bob Marley, Soul Rebel—Natural Mystic (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1981); Vivien Goldman, The Book of Exodus: The Making and
Meaning of Bob Marley and the Wailers’ Album of the Century (New York:
Three Rivers Press, 2006); Kim Gottlieb-Walker, Jeff Walker, Cameron
Crowe, and Roger Steffens, Bob Marley and the Golden Age of Reggae
(London: Titan Books, 2010); Colin Grant, The Natural Mystics: Marley,
Tosh, and Wailer (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011); David
V. Moskowitz, Bob Marley: A Biography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
2007); David V. Moskowitz, The Words and Music of Bob Marley (Westport,
CT: Praeger, 2007); Adebayo Ojo, Bob Marley: Songs of African Redemption
(Ikeja, Nigeria; Oxford: Malthouse, 2000); Chris Salewicz, Bob Marley:
The Untold Story (New York: Faber and Faber, 2010); Sanaa, Tribute to Bob
Marley and Other Poems (Pittsburgh: Dorrance Publishing Co. Inc., 2009);
Maureen Sheridan, Bob Marley: Soul Rebel: The Stories Behind Every Song
1962–1981 (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999); Maureen Sheridan,
Bob Marley: The Stories Behind Every Song (Stories Behind the Songs)
(London: Carlton Books, 2011); Bruce Talamon and Roger Steffens, Bob
Marley: Spirit Dancer (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994); Jason Toynbee,
Bob Marley: Herald of a Postcolonial World? (Cambridge: Polity, 2007);
Timothy White, Catch a Fire: The Life of Bob Marley (New York: Henry
Holt, 1996).
5. Harry Stecopoulos and Michael Uebel, eds., Race and the Subject of
Masculinities (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); Gregory Stephens,
On Racial Frontiers: The New Culture of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison,
and Bob Marley (Cambridge [England]; New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1999).
6. Michelle Stephens, Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of
Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1962 (Durham: Duke
7. Stephen Johnson, Burnt Cork: Traditions and Legacies of Blackface
Minstrelsy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012);
W.T. Lhamon, Jr., Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to
Hip Hop (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); Marvin McAllister,
Whiting Up: Whiteface Minstrels and Stage Europeans in African American

Performance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011);
Robert Nowatzki, Representing African Americans in Transatlantic
Abolitionism and Blackface Minstrelsy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 2010); Michael Pickering, Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain
(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008); Yuval Taylor, Jake Austen, and Mel
Watkins, Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop (New
York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012).
8. Leslie Gourse, Unforgettable: The Life and Mystique of Nat King Cole (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991); Brian Ward, “Civil Rights and Rock and
Roll: Revisiting the Nat King Cole Attack of 1956,” OAH Magazine of
History 24.2 (April 2010): 21–24.
9. Helen Oakley Dance, Stormy Monday: The T-Bone Walker Story (New York:
Da Capo Press, 1990); Joseph Weidlich, Trading Licks: Charlie Christian
& T-Bone Walker (Anaheim Hills, CA: Centerstream Publishing, LLC;
Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard Corporation, 2015).
10. John Cowley, “Really the ‘Walking Blues’: Son House, Muddy Waters,
Robert Johnson and the Development of a Traditional Blues,” Popular
Music 1, Folk or Popular? Distinctions, Influences, Continuities (1981):
57–72; Robert Gordon and Keith Richards, Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life
and Times of Muddy Waters (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2013); Eric
W. Rothenbuhler, “For-the-Record Aesthetics and Robert Johnson’s Blues
Style as a Product of Recorded Culture,” Popular Music 26.1, Special Issue
on the Blues in Honour of Paul Oliver (Jan., 2007): 65–81; Peter Rutkoff
and Will Scott, “Preaching the Blues: The Mississippi Delta of Muddy
Waters,” The Kenyon Review New Series 27.2 (Spring, 2005): 129–147;
Patricia R. Schroeder, Robert Johnson, Mythmaking, and Contemporary
American Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Elijah
Wald, Escaping the Delta (New York: HarperCollins, 2005).
11. Clifton C. Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot
Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2009); T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus: Sexualized
Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1999); Deborah Willis, Black Venus, 2010: They
Called Her “Hottentot” (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010).
12. Rachel Adams, Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural
Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Robert
Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
13. Anna Kerchy and Andrea Zittlau, Exploring the Cultural History of
Continental European Freak Shows and “Enfreakment” (Newcastle upon
Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2012).
52 A. LEFKOVITZ
14. Lillian Craton, The Victorian Freak Show: The Significance of Disability and
Physical Differences in 19th-Century Fiction (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press,
2009).
15. Marlene Tromp, Victorian Freaks: The Social Context of Freakery in Britain
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008).
16. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the
Extraordinary Body (New York: New York University Press, 1996); Marc
Hartzman, American Sideshow: An Encyclopedia of History’s Most Wondrous
and Curiously Strange Performers (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin,
2005); Jack Hunter, Freak Babylon: An Illustrated History of Teratology &
Freakshows (London: Glitter Books, 2005).
17. Linda Holtzman and Leon Sharpe, Media Messages: What Film, Television,
and Popular Music Teach Us About Race, Class, Gender, and Sexual
Orientation (New York: Routledge, 2015).
18. F.W. Gooding, Khalid J. Patterson, and Minority Reporter (Firm), You
Mean, There’s Race in My Movie?: The Complete Guide to Understanding
Race in Mainstream Hollywood (Silver Spring, MD: On the Reelz Press,
2007).
19. W.R. Grant, Post-Soul Black Cinema: Discontinuities, Innovations, and
Breakpoints, 1970–1995 (New York: Routledge, 2004).
20. Robert Lang, The Birth of a Nation: D.W. Griffith, Director (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994); Dick Lehr, The Birth of a
Nation: How a Legendary Filmmaker and a Crusading Editor Reignited
America’s Civil War (New York: PublicAffairs, a Member of the Perseus
Books Group, 2014); Edward Wagenknecht, Cavalcade of the American
Novel, from the Birth of the Nation to the Middle of the Twentieth Century
(New York: Holt, 1952).
21. Mikel J. Koven, Blaxploitation Films (Harpenden [Hertfordshire]: Kamera,
2010); Novotny Lawrence, Blaxploitation Films of the 1970s: Blackness and
Genre (New York: Routledge, 2008); Christopher Sieving, Soul Searching:
Black-Themed Cinema from the March on Washington to the Rise of
Blaxploitation (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011).
22. Ben Dickenson, Hollywood’s New Radicalism: War, Globalisation and the
Movies from Reagan to George W. Bush (London; New York: New York:
I.B. Tauris, 2006); Gregory Frame, The American President in Film and
Television: Myth, Politics and Representation (Oxford; New York: Peter
Lang, 2014); Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the
Reagan Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994);
Kenneth MacKinnon, The Politics of Popular Representation: Reagan,
Thatcher, AIDS, and the Movies (Rutherford: London; Cranbury, NJ:
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992); John W. Matviko, The
American President in Popular Culture (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
2005); Alan Nadel, Flatlining on the Field of Dreams: Cultural Narratives

in the Films of President Reagan’s America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1997); Stephen Prince and American Council of Learned
Societies, American Cinema of the 1980s: Themes and Variations (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007); Michael Paul Rogin,
Ronald Reagan, the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
23. Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993).
24. Mia Mask, Divas on Screen: Black Women in American Film (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2009); Mia Mask, Contemporary Black
American Cinema: Race, Gender and Sexuality at the Movies (New York:
Routledge, 2012).
25. Lola Young, Fear of the Dark: “Race,” Gender, and Sexuality in the Cinema
(London; New York: Routledge, 1996).
26. Donald Bogle, Heat Wave: The Life and Career of Ethel Waters (New York:
HarperCollins, 2011); Stephen Bourne, Ethel Waters: Stormy Weather
(Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007); Ethel Waters, His Eye Is on the
Sparrow (New York: Doubleday, 1951).
27. Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the
Image of Common Sense (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
28. Langston Hughes and Christopher C. De Santis, Langston Hughes and the
Chicago Defender: Essays on Race, Politics, and Culture, 1942–62 (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1995); Vera M. Kutzinski, The Worlds of
Langston Hughes: Modernism and Translation in the Americas (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2012); Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston
Hughes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
29. Phyllis Rauch Klotman and Janet K. Cutler, Struggles for Representation:
African American Documentary Film and Video (Bloomington: Indiana
30. David J. Leonard, Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American
Cinema (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2006).
31. Paula J. Massood, Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences
in Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003); Jacqueline Najuma
Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
32. Pearl Bowser, Jane Gaines, and Charles Musser, Oscar Micheaux and His
Circle: African-American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); J. Ronald Green, Straight
Lick: The Cinema of Oscar Micheaux (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2000); Oscar Micheaux, The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994).
54 A. LEFKOVITZ
33. Michael Boyce Gillespie, Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of
Black Film (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2016).
34. Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, Jan-Christopher Horak, and Allyson Nadia
Field, L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema (Oakland: University
of California Press, 2015).
35. Matthew Bernstein, “Nostalgia, Ambivalence, Irony: ‘Song of the South’
and Race Relations in 1946 Atlanta,” Film History 8.2, The 1950s and
Beyond (1996): 219–236; Jennifer Frost, “Hedda Hopper, Hollywood
Gossip, and the Politics of Racial Representation in Film, 1946–1948,”
Journal of African American History 93.1 (Winter, 2008): 36–63; Jason
Sperb, Disney’s Most Notorious Film: Race, Convergence, and the Hidden
Histories of Song of the South (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013).
36. William D. Carrigan, The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and
Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836–1916 (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2004); Rebecca Nell Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law: Anti-lynching and
Labor Defense in U.S. Radical History (Durham: Duke University Press,
2008); Ida B. Wells-Barnett, On Lynchings (Amherst, NY: Humanity
Books, 2002).
37. Ellen C. Scott, Cinema Civil Rights: Regulation, Repression, and Race in
the Classical Hollywood Era (New Brunswick; London: Rutgers University
Press, 2015).
38. Finis Farr, Black Champion: The Life and Times of Jack Johnson (London:
Macmillan, 1964); Jack Johnson, Jack Johnson in the Ring and Out
(Chicago: National Sports Pub. Co., 1927); Jack Johnson, Jack Johnson Is
a Dandy: An Autobiography (New York: Chelsea House, 1969); Randy
Roberts, Papa Jack: Jack Johnson and the Era of White Hopes (New York;
London: Free Press, 1983); Theresa Runstedtler, Jack Johnson, Rebel
Sojourner: Boxing in the Shadow of the Global Color Line (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2012).
39. Cara Caddoo, Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern
Black Life (Cambridge, MA; London, England: Harvard University Press,
2014).
40. Mark Reid, Black Lenses, Black Voices: African American Film Now
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).
41. Jesse Algeron Rhines, Black Film, White Money (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 1996); Larry Richards, African American Films
Through 1959: A Comprehensive, Illustrated Filmography (Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 1998).
42. Cedric J. Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the
Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film Before World War II
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); André Seewood,
Slave Cinema: The Crisis of the African-American in Film (Philadelphia:
Xlibris Corp., 2008); Valerie Smith, ed., Representing Blackness: Issues in

Film and Video (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997);
Judith Weisenfeld, Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in
American Film, 1929–1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2007).
43. Spike Lee and Cynthia Fuchs, Spike Lee: Interviews (Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 2002); Paula J. Massood, The Spike Lee Reader
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007); Bill Yousman, The Spike Lee
Enigma: Challenge and Incorporation in Media Culture (New York: Peter
Lang, 2014).
44. Manthia Diawara, Black American Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1993).
45. Anna Everett, Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism,
1909–1949 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).
46. Sara Horsfall, Jan-Martijn Meij, and Meghan D. Probstfield, Music
Sociology: Examining the Role of Music in Social Life (London: Routledge,
2016); John Shepherd and Kyle Devine, The Routledge Reader on the
Sociology of Music (New York; Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2015).
47. Joseph A. Kotarba, Bryce Merrill, J. Patrick Williams, and Phillip Vannini,
Understanding Society Through Popular Music (New York: Routledge,
2013).
48. Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
49. Rachel Rubin and Jeffrey Paul Melnick, American Popular Music: New
Approaches to the Twentieth Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 2001).
50. Philip Furia, The Poets of Tin Pan Alley: A History of America’s Great
Lyricists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Thomas Walsh, Tin
Pan Alley and the Philippines: American Songs of War And Love, 1898–
1946, A Resource Guide (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013); Tighe
E. Zimmers, Tin Pan Alley Girl: A Biography of Ann Ronell (Jefferson,
NC: McFarland & Co., 2009).
51. Larry Starr and Christopher Alan Waterman, American Popular Music:
From Minstrelsy to MTV (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
52. Sara Cohen, Sites of Popular Music Heritage: Memories, Histories, Places
(New York: Routledge, 2015).
53. Jann Pasler, Writing Through Music: Essays on Music, Culture, and Politics
(Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
54. Björn Horgby and Fredrik Nilsson, Rockin’ the Borders: Rock Music and
Social, Cultural and Political Change (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars,
2010).
55. Chuck Berry, Chuck Berry: The Autobiography (London: Faber, 2001);
Paul H. Fryer, “‘Brown-Eyed Handsome Man’: Chuck Berry and the
56 A. LEFKOVITZ
Blues Tradition,” Phylon (1960–) 42.1 (1st Qtr., 1981): 60–72;

W.T. Lhamon, Jr., “Chuck Berry and the Sambo Strategy in the 1950s,”
Studies in Popular Culture 12.2 (1989): 20–29; W.T. Lhamon, Jr.,
Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s
(Cambridge, MA [u.a.]: Harvard University Press, 2002); Bruce Pegg
Florence, Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck
Berry (Milton Park: Taylor and Francis, 2013); Timothy D. Taylor, “His
Name Was in Lights: Chuck Berry’s ‘Johnny B. Goode,’” Popular Music
11.1 (Jan., 1992): 27–40.
56. Maureen Mahon, Right to Rock: The Black Rock Coalition and the Cultural
Politics of Race (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
57. Jack Hamilton, Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial
Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016).
58. T.D. Rice and W.T. Lhamon, Jim Crow, American: Selected Songs and Plays
(Cambridge, MA [u.a.]: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009);
Gabrilla Varró, “Blackface Minstrelsy: An Alternative Discourse on
Dominance,” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies
(HJEAS) 2.1, American Studies Issue (1996): 57–71.
59. Jack Hamilton, “How Rock and Roll Became White and How the Rolling
Stones, a Band in Love with Black Music, Helped Lead the Way to Rock’s
Segregated Future,” Slate, 6 Oct. 2016, www.slate.com/articles/arts/
music_box/2016/10/race_rock_and_the_rolling_stones_how_the_rock_
and_roll_became_white.html. Accessed 18 Dec. 2017; Margo Jefferson,
“Ripping Off Black Music,” Harper’s Magazine, Jan. 1973, https://harp-
ers.org/archive/1973/01/ripping-off-black-music/. Accessed 18 Dec.
2017.
60. Steven Block, “Pitch-Class Transformation in Free Jazz,” Music Theory
Spectrum 12.2 (Autumn, 1990): 181–202; Steven Block, “‘Bemsha
Swing’: The Transformation of a Bebop Classic to Free Jazz,” Music Theory
Spectrum 19.2 (Autumn, 1997): 206–231; Keren Omry, “Literary Free
Jazz? ‘Mumbo Jumbo’ and ‘Paradise’: Language and Meaning,” African
American Review 41.1 (Spring, 2007): 127–141.
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CHAPTER 3
Jimi Hendrix and Black-Transnational

Popular Music’s Global Gender
and Sexualized Histories
Abstract This chapter contends that Hendrix, though commonly thought

of as the quintessentially hetero-normative rock star, can be seen and
heard as a queer, or sexually interstitial, global gender and sexual symbol.
It argues that Hendrix enters a tradition of queer black-transnational rep-
resentations through his unconventional and “freakish” image and perfor-
mative disposition. This chapter centers Hendrix’s global gender and
sexual visual-cultural depictions, linking Hendrix to additional black-
transnational popular musicians’ global gender and sexual histories and
representational struggles. This chapter also argues that Hendrix’s perfor-
mative demeanor exhibited an unabashed sexuality and subversion and
participation in the maintenance of fixed hetero-normative global gender
and sexual roles in rock music and beyond. Complicating his fixed hetero-
normative image, this chapter notes how Hendrix made flexible the strict
divisions separating male and female genders and queer and straight
sexualities.
Keywords Queer • Falsetto • Electric Guitar • Gospel
Though in one sense he was part of rock music’s pantheon of hyper-

masculine guitar heroes, Jimi Hendrix has nonetheless been visually seen
and sonically heard as a queer, or sexually interstitial, racialized global

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77013-0_3
68 A. LEFKOVITZ
gender and sexualized symbol. As Hendrix takes his place within a legacy
of queer black-transnational histories for his unconventional, queer, and
“freakish” performative image, he follows a long line of twentieth-century
male black-transnational performers appearing to conform to hetero-sexist
expectations while subverting global gender and sexual hegemonies in
their performative and personal lives.
Following Hendrix’s centrality to mid-twentieth-century US and black-
transnational racial histories, transgressive global gender and sexual visual-
cultural and popular musical representations circulate of a rock star who
possessed his guitar in a kind of simulated sexual ecstasy even as his shy
offstage demeanor belied his apparently macho image. Hendrix’s popular
music offered a kind of contradiction. In the classic-rock staples “Fire”
and “Foxy Lady” (both 1967), heard in such films as Wayne’s World
(1992) (featuring the character Garth participating in a suitably neo-
liberal, Reagan-era minstrel reworking of the Hendrix classic), Hendrix
continued to perform rock’s aggressive “phallic backbeat.”1 However, in
such tender ballads as “Little Wing” (1967), “Castles Made of Sand”
(1967), “The Wind Cries Mary” (1967), and “Angel” (1971), Hendrix
subverted rock’s apparently self-evident machismo while performing
countercultural gender and sexual roles in a subculture known for being
the quintessential medium for male egos’ excess.
Hendrix’s conventional yet queer global gender and sexual roles echo
such black-transnational performers as Prince, Smokey Robinson, Eddie
Kendricks of the Temptations, Philip Bailey of Earth, Wind, and Fire,
Michael Jackson, and others’ use of falsetto (the voice’s upper register),
described as “unnatural” in global gender and hetero-normative sexual
terms. Disturbing his fixed, macho-rock image, Hendrix, similar to other
black-transnational performers before and after him, transgressed immov-
able divisions between male and female genders and queer and straight
sexualities.
Hendrix links to additional male black-transnational popular musicians’
global gender and sexual representational struggles. These include such
performers as Charlie Christian, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Wilson
Pickett, Solomon Burke, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Donny Hathaway,
Percy Mayfield, Gil Scott-Heron, and Curtis Mayfield. Though Hendrix
performed a central role in the mid-twentieth century as a US popular
musical exceptionalist symbol and perceived black-transnational
heterosexual figure, his onstage, performative demeanor and shy, offstage
personality exhibited a queer subversion of unchanging, hetero-normative
global gender and sexual roles.
JIMI HENDRIX AND BLACK-TRANSNATIONAL POPULAR MUSIC’S GLOBAL… 69
Charlie Christian
Hendrix was strongly influenced by the electric guitar solos of Charlie
Christian (1916–1942), the African-American jazz guitarist who was one
of the first to perform improvisations using electrically amplified equip-
ment, and whose brief recording career helped raise the guitar from an
accompanying to dominant solo instrument.2 Christian grew up in Great
Depression-era Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and studied music with his
father, an itinerant and blind guitarist-singer and trumpet player. He also
studied with guitarist Eddie Durham, who pioneered the electric guitar
while a member of the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra and who, in 1937,
inspired Christian to use an amplified instrument.
Thanks to the research of eminent African-American writer Ralph
Ellison, Christian’s obscure and impoverished early life emerged. Too
poor to buy his own instrument, Christian created a guitar out of cigar
boxes and earned a notable local reputation. In the early 1930s, Christian
performed with “territory bands,” or dance bands that crisscrossed the US
from the 1920s to the 1960s, led by Anna Mae Winburn (1913–1999),
who later led the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, one of the most
integrated all-women’s bands in the US,3 and Nat Towles (1905–1963),
an African-American musician and jazz and big-band leader popular in his
hometown of New Orleans, as well as Chicago, and North Omaha,
Nebraska. The Nat Towles band is considered one of the greatest territory
bands.
By 1937, Christian was experimenting with electrical amplification and
built on his reputation. He became known as a guitarist of immense talent
and, in 1939, on the advice of Mary Lou Williams (1910–1981),4 an African-
American jazz pianist and composer, was heard by John Hammond. Thinking
Christian would be an ideal addition to the small jazz groups of Benny
Goodman (1909–1986), the US bandleader and renowned twentieth-
century clarinet virtuoso dubbed the “King of Swing,”5 Hammond arranged
a meeting between Christian and Goodman, which eventually led to Christian
becoming a permanent member of his small group.
Before Christian, the guitar was primarily used for its rhythmic func-
tion, with the sound of an acoustic guitar in a big band something that
was “felt” instead of heard. Christian began to realize the guitar’s poten-
tial for single-line solos, especially in the use of sustained and “bent” notes.
The strong influence of tenor saxophonist Lester Young (1909–1959),
emerging in the mid-1930s Kansas City, Missouri jazz world with the
70 A. LEFKOVITZ
Count Basie band and introducing an approach to improvisation that pro-

vided much of the basis for modern jazz solo conception, can also be
heard in Christian’s playing.
With Charlie Parker (1920–1955), composer, bandleader, and gener-
ally considered the greatest jazz saxophonist, and Dizzy Gillespie
(1917–1993), jazz trumpeter, composer, and bandleader, Christian’s style
signaled the development of the late 1940s subgenre of bebop, an intimate,
dissonant jazz radically contrasting with swing’s assimilation into domi-
nant US cultural tendencies of Pollyannaish utopianism, innocence, sim-
plicity, and cheap optimism.6 Christian performed at Minton’s Playhouse,
a New York nightclub, with Parker, Gillespie, Thelonious Monk
(1917–1982), the pianist and composer who was among modern jazz’s
first creators, and drummer Kenny Clarke (1914–1985), a major exponent
of the 1940s bebop jazz movement.
In recordings made of these informal sessions, Christian’s level of tech-
nique and harmonic sophistication can be heard. The most outstanding
soloist of his time on electric guitar, Christian was among the first jazz
guitarists to amplify his instrument, equaling the volume of wind instru-
ments. Emulated by swing-style players and influencing younger bebop
guitarists, some of Christian’s melodies, especially his chromaticisms (the
use of notes foreign to the mode or diatonic scale upon which a composi-
tion is based), became commonly used among bebop musicians. Among
the swing era’s most creative soloists, Christian was a key figure in the jazz
guitar’s evolution. Predating Hendrix’s demise at age 27, Christian made
only a few records before his death at age 25. Christian’s improvisations,
rhythmic drive, and blues-influenced guitar playing changed jazz and the
guitar’s place in the genre. The first major electric guitar soloist, Christian
shifted the instrument from its secondary role in the rhythm section to a
powerful force.
Chuck Berry
From a working-class African-American neighborhood on the north side
of highly segregated St. Louis, Chuck Berry grew up in a family with
African-American and Native-American ancestry. Berry was exposed early
to music through his family’s participation in the Antioch Baptist Church
choir, music classes, and the blues and country-and-western music he
heard on the radio. In 1955, Berry recorded “Maybellene,” a country-
and-western-influenced song. With his guitar’s unique sounds, and the
rhythmic and melodic virtuosity of his piano player Johnnie Johnson,

Berry’s songs became staples in multiple rock-and-roll bands’ repertoires.
At his popularity’s height in the early 1960s, federal authorities prosecuted
Berry for violating the Mann Act, echoing charges against black-
transnational boxer Jack Johnson, with allegations contending that Berry
transported an underage woman across state lines “for immoral purposes.”
After two racially tainted trials, Berry was convicted and remanded to
prison.
Once released, Berry recorded new hits for the pop charts, including
“No Particular Place to Go” in 1964, at the height of the British Invasion,
a movement consisting of British rock-and-roll (“beat”) groups whose
popularity rapidly spread to the US,7 and whose prime movers, the Beatles
and Rolling Stones, were hugely influenced by Berry (as were Buddy
Holly, Elvis Presley,8 Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Linda Ronstadt, and
the Beach Boys, who rewrote “Sweet Little Sixteen” [1958] as “Surfin’
USA” [1963] to attain their first million-seller). The Beatles recorded two
of Berry’s compositions, taking “Roll Over Beethoven” (1956) into the
US charts. The Rolling Stones drew from Berry’s catalogue, performing
“Come On” (1963) as their debut single, as well as “Around and Around”
(1964), “You Can’t Catch Me” (1965), and “Little Queenie” (1969),
non-Berry songs that imitated his approach, as Keith Richards’ rhythmic,
propulsive guitar figures drew from Berry.
One of the most influential figures in rock histories, Berry helped create
the genre from R&B. Known for his crafty lyrics, distinct guitar, boogie-
woogie rhythms, clear diction, cool vocal style, a dazzling stage show, and
musical techniques characteristic of country-and-western music and the
blues, Berry produced many best-selling singles and albums. Using elec-
tronic effects to simulate the ringing sounds of bottleneck blues guitarists,
Berry utilized a range of transnational genres in his compositions, such as
Caribbean music on “Havana Moon” (1957) and “Man and the Donkey”
(1963). Berry was influenced by guitar players Charlie Christian, Carl
Hogan, and T-Bone Walker and vocalists Charles Brown and Louis Jordan
(1908–1975), saxophonist, singer, and seminal figure in the development
of R&B and rock and roll, whose bouncing, rhythmic vitality, clever lyrics,
and engaging stage presence enabled him to become one of the few 1940s
African-American artists to enjoy crossover popularity with a white
audience.
Berry was central in widening rhythm-and-blues’ appeal in the 1950s.
Romanticizing US consumer culture and teenage life, writing songs about
72 A. LEFKOVITZ
high school, teen dances, cars, and love in an attempt to reach a racially
mixed audience, Berry’s lyrics enticed the growing teenage market by pre-
senting explicit and comical descriptions. Berry’s recordings highlight
early rock and roll’s lyrical and musical development. In the 1950s and
1960s, Berry composed hit songs that became rock and roll standards.
Based on 12-bar blues progressions, Berry’s songs were played at fast tem-
pos with an emphasis on the backbeat. Berry’s clear baritone mixed blues
and R&B licks with bluegrass inflections, adapted to a pop-song format.
Like other African-American musicians, Berry faced racism, especially
early in his career. While some promoters thought he was white because of
his clear diction, Berry was turned away from live performances when his
racial difference was revealed. As an entrepreneur and musician, Berry
uniquely transversed racial and musical borders, delivering “down-home”
blues in the dialect language they came from. When playing hillbilly songs,
Berry stressed his diction so it sounded “whiter.” Berry’s intention was to
maintain a black and white clientele by voicing different kinds of songs in
their customary style.
In 1952, Berry joined Johnnie Johnson (piano) and Ebby Hardy (drums)
in the house band at the Cosmopolitan Club in St. Louis. The trio became
a popular attraction, performing R&B, country/hillbilly songs, and stan-
dards, particularly those of Nat “King” Cole. Composing multiple classics,
Berry’s releases include “Too Much Monkey Business” and “Brown-Eyed
Handsome Man” (both 1956), “School Days” (a second R&B number
one) and “Rock and Roll Music” (both 1957), “Sweet Little Sixteen,”
“Reelin’ and Rockin’,” “Johnny B. Goode,” “Around and Around,” and
“Memphis Tennessee” (all 1958), “Little Queenie,” “Back in the USA,”
and “Let It Rock” (all 1959), “Bye Bye Johnny” and “Jaguar and
Thunderbird” (both 1960), and “Nadine,” “You Never Can Tell,” “No
Particular Place to Go,” and “The Promised Land” (all 1964). A key figure
in popular music’s evolution, between 1955 and 1960 Berry was at a career
peak, enjoying a run of 17 R&B Top 20 entries and appearing in films and
on television in Rock Rock Rock! (1956), The Guy Mitchell Show television
series (1957), Mister Rock and Roll (1957), and Go, Johnny, Go! (1959).
Little Richard
Similarly exoticized as a racialized “freak,” Little Richard was the wildest
and one of the greatest and most influential 1950s rock and roll singers
and songwriters. Richard first recorded in late 1951, cutting eight urban
blues9 tracks with his mentor Billy Wright’s orchestra. The classic “Tutti
Frutti” gave Richard his first R&B and pop hit in the US. Although part
of the first wave of rock and roll hits, “Tutti Frutti” was more assertive and
kept more aspects of African-American vernacular music-making than
other early recordings in this style. In 1957, Richard garnered massive
transatlantic success with the rock and roll classics “Lucille,” “Keep a
Knockin’,” and “Jenny Jenny.” In the mid-1960s, soul music was taking
hold worldwide and Richard’s soulful track “I Don’t Know What You’ve
Got But It’s Got Me” featured Hendrix on guitar and was among the best
recordings of the genre. Richard’s early influences were gospel music,
Louis Jordan, and other late-1940s jump-blues and urban-blues artists.
“Tutti Frutti” set the tone for Little Richard’s hits that followed
between 1956 and 1958. With a rapid, boogie-shuffle rhythm with stop-
time breaks, Richard playfully sang double-entendres near the top of his
range in a timbre punctuated by his trademark falsetto. Richard’s piano
playing derived from the boogie-woogie style, emphasizing the upbeat
and featuring glissandos (a continuous slide upward or downward between
two notes). Displaying a raw energy and flamboyance, a frantic, unre-
strained style, and outspokenness, Richard often left his piano to dance,
sometimes on top of his instrument. In addition to his manic performing
style as a singer, pianist, and dancer, Richard’s freakish visual-cultural spec-
tacle, predating Hendrix, added to his sense of outrageousness.
Richard’s pompadour, liberal use of make-up, and gaudy clothing
alluded to a type of cross-dressing and queer sexuality when such issues
were taboo and linked to the homosexual-identified, “pink” communist
threat at home and abroad. Accepted by the white public due in part to
the fact that his performance style was seen as an updated form of black-
face minstrelsy, Richard was nonetheless covered by Pat Boone, a singer
and television personality known for his wholesome 1950s pop hits and
hosting evangelical radio and television programs. Having appeared in the
films Don’t Knock the Rock and The Girl Can’t Help It (both 1956) and
Mister Rock ‘n’ Roll (1957), in late 1962 Richard toured the UK for the
first time and the now short-haired wild man pounding pianos and pierc-
ing eardrums with his manic falsetto was a great success. In 1963, Richard
performed in Europe with the Beatles and Rolling Stones, both of whom
were great enthusiasts of his music.
Richard’s extroverted style made him one of the rock and roll era’s
most successful performers. His impassioned, high-tessitura (the range
within which most notes of a vocal part fall) singing influenced James
74 A. LEFKOVITZ
Brown (1933–2006), singer, songwriter, arranger, and dancer, who was

one of the most important and influential entertainers in twentieth-
century popular music and whose achievements earned him the nicknames
“the Hardest-Working Man in Show Business,” “The Godfather of Soul,”
“The Godfather of Funk,” “Mr. Please, Please,” “King of the One
Nighters,” “Soul Brother #1,” “The Sex Machine,” and “The Minister of
the New New Super Heavy Funk.”10
Between 1958 and 1962, Richard recorded only gospel music. At his
career’s height, he shocked the rock world by announcing, during an
Australian tour, that he was quitting music to enroll in a theological col-
lege. Richard received his bachelor of arts from the bible school Oakwood
College in Huntsville, Alabama, was ordained a minister in the Seventh
Day Adventist Church, and preached throughout the US. Once a leader
of rebellious 1950s rock and roll and the man who disturbed the music
business and parents of the period, Richard’s countercultural identity has
been usurped by a much tamer and much-loved personality, accepted by
diverse age groups. Though he “out-rocked” most, there was often an
excess of Las Vegas-style glitter, posturing, and self-parody. Continuing in
the spotlight after 40 years of performing, Richard influenced John
Fogerty, lead singer, lead guitarist, and principal songwriter of the band
Creedence Clearwater Revival (CCR), and Paul McCartney, British vocal-
ist, songwriter, composer, bass player, poet, painter, and one of the most
popular solo performers of all time in terms of sales of his recordings and
attendance at his concerts, whose work with the Beatles in the 1960s
helped lift popular music from its origins in the entertainment business
and transform it into a creative, highly commercial art form.
Wilson Pickett
Though he first recorded in 1957 as part of a gospel quartet, soul singer-
songwriter Wilson Pickett (1941–2006) decided to sing secular music. In
1965, he recorded in Memphis at Stax Records, a record label initially
based in Memphis, Tennessee. Founded in 1957 as Satellite Records, the
label changed its name to Stax in 1961 and was a major factor in the cre-
ation of Southern soul and Memphis soul music. Stax also released gospel,
funk, jazz, and blues recordings. While renowned for its output of African-
American music, the label was founded by white siblings and business part-
ners Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton (STewart/AXton=Stax). The
label also featured ethnically integrated bands (including its house band,
Booker T. & The M.G.’s) and a racially integrated team of staff and artists,
unprecedented during a time of racial strife in Memphis, the South, and the
US more broadly.11
One of soul music’s harshest voices, by the mid-1970s Pickett released
over 40 records in the R&B and pop charts. One of the 1960s great
Southern soul singers, Pickett began performing with Detroit-based R&B
groups. Pickett’s explosive style helped define 1960s soul music. A p
roduct
of the Southern black church, gospel was at the core of Pickett’s musical
manner and onstage persona. Testifying rather than singing and preaching
rather than crooning, Pickett’s delivery was noted by the fervor of his reli-
gious conviction. With thousands of other Southern farmworkers, Pickett
migrated to 1950s industrial Detroit, Michigan, where his father worked in
an auto plant. Pickett’s first recording experience was in pure gospel, as he
modeled himself after Julius Cheeks of the Sensational Nightingales, a
powerful shouter. As Pickett switched to secular music, his smash single,
“In the Midnight Hour” (1965), launched him to stardom, and he became
a leading exponent of the “Southern-fried” school of soul singing.
Solomon Burke
“King of Soul” and gospel singer Solomon Burke (1940–2010) achieved
early 1960s success by merging the gospel style of the African-American
church with R&B, helping to usher in the soul-music era. Born into a fam-
ily that established its own church, by the age of 12 Burke was a preacher
and host of a gospel radio program. From a family of Christian ministers,
Burke was known as the “Wonder-Boy Preacher” after appearing on
Philadelphia radio at age nine. He began recording in 1955 but did not
have his first national hit until 1961, with an R&B version of a country
ballad, “Just Out of Reach.” As his recordings incorporated such gospel-
derived vocal techniques as shouted interjections, exhortatory recitations,
melisma (an ornamental phrase of several notes sung to one syllable of
text, as in plainsong or blues singing), and rasping timbre, Burke became
one of the first R&B performers to be called a soul artist. In the early
1960s, Burke developed what he called his “rock and soul music,” with
most of his best recordings melodramatic ballads. Like Ray Charles, Burke
helped shape the soul-music genre by adapting vocal motifs of African-
American religious music to secular themes. This influenced Mick Jagger,
and the Rolling Stones later recorded versions of “Everybody Needs
Somebody to Love” and “Cry to Me.”
76 A. LEFKOVITZ
Sam Cooke
Gospel and soul singer and songwriter Sam Cooke (1931–1964) first sang
gospel music professionally as a teenager. In 1950, Cooke replaced
R.H. Harris as lead singer in one of the most important post-World War
II gospel quartets, the Soul Stirrers. Singing lead on emotionally charged
recordings and recorded as a solo secular artist, Cooke was one of the first
black popular musicians to attempt to take control of the business part of
his career, starting his own publishing company in 1958 and his own
record labels in 1959 and 1962. Cooke has an enormous legacy, influenc-
ing such soul singers as Otis Redding, Bobby Womack, Al Green, and
Johnnie Taylor.
With his songs covered multiple times by rock and soul artists, Cooke
was creating a new style of music, soul, by reworking the gospel anthems
that were at the heart of his music. “A Change Is Gonna Come” (1964),
one of his greatest compositions, acted as a metaphor for the concomitant
Civil Rights Movement. Cooke’s songs were interpreted by such diverse
acts as Rod Stewart, the Animals, and Cat Stevens. The Rolling Stones’
cover version of “Little Red Rooster” echoed Cooke’s reading rather than
Howlin’ Wolf. A seminal influence on soul music and R&B, Cooke’s
smooth delivery highlighted his incredible singing voice.
Otis Redding
Soul singer and songwriter Otis Redding (1941–1967) moved to Macon,
Georgia, at age three and played drums with gospel groups every Sunday
morning at the Macon radio station. The son of a Baptist minister with the
same name, Redding became interested in R&B and jump blues, a style of
popular music combining elements of swing and blues. As a teenager,
Redding sang in a gospel quartet before becoming lead singer in local
guitar virtuoso Johnny Jenkins’s secular group. Redding recorded two
singles as a solo artist for the Trans World and Orbit labels before audi-
tioning at Stax Records.
Influenced by Little Richard and Sam Cooke, Redding’s initial release
on the Stax subsidiary, Volt Records, was “These Arms of Mine” (1963),
the first in a series of ballads. Redding also performed mid-tempo, riff-
based songs, such as “Respect” and “I Can’t Turn You Loose” (both
1965). At Stax, Redding made over 120 recordings, of which only three
include backing singers. Preferring the three- or four-piece Stax horn sec-
tion, referred to as the Memphis Horns, Redding played an important role
in shaping the Stax horn sound, writing syncopated lines, starting in uni-
son, and finishing in harmony. Redding also introduced the concept of
arranged horn ensemble sections replacing a bridge or improvised instru-
mental solo.
After resettling in Macon, Redding began singing full time. His debut
single, “She’s Alright” (1967), and “Shout Bamalama” (1968) were in the
Little Richard mold. A cult figure until 1965, the release of the Otis Blue
(1965) album, in which original material was heard next to cover versions
of the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” (1965) and two
songs by another mentor, Sam Cooke (“Wonderful World” [1960] and
“A Change Is Gonna Come” [1964]), launched a major appreciation.
For most of his life, Redding was extremely successful with African-
American audiences, though he sold on a limited basis to white consum-
ers. In 1967, that began to change when he headlined a Stax/Volt
European tour and the wistful “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay” reached
number one in the R&B and pop charts. Redding’s popularity was further
enhanced by the tour of the Hit the Road Stax revue in 1967, especially in
Europe. At the 1967 Monterey International Pop Music Festival, Redding
appeared onstage out of fashion with the countercultural audience, wear-
ing one of his familiar dark-green silk-and-mohair suits. As he calmed and
unified the “love crowd,” Redding’s set, along with Hendrix’s, was the
highlight of the festival. Hendrix and Redding’s performances at Monterey
illuminated two artists who were among the greatest of their respective
genres of rock and soul. Each were outstanding stars at the festival, and
they remain towering giants of black popular music.
Redding brought black popular music to middle-class white hippies
who had never heard soul music. “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay”
became his only million-seller and US pop number one. The apparent
serenity of the single, about sitting in San Francisco’s harbor, and several
posthumous album tracks, suggest an unfulfilled maturity as a songwriter,
as Redding, like Hendrix and other apparently “tragic” black popular
musicians, died young. With his emotional drive and distinctive sound,
Redding matched the smooth vocal artistry of such artists as Marvin Gaye,
Curtis Mayfield, and Al Green. Composing a considerable number of clas-
sic songs, which stand as some of the most enduring moments of soul
music’s “golden age,” Redding was a giant of the genre, even though his
achievements were accomplished in just a three-year period.
78 A. LEFKOVITZ
Marvin Gaye
The best-selling Motown artist of all time, soul singer, drummer, song-
writer, and producer Marvin Gaye (1939–1984) was one of soul music’s
premier performers, ushering in the era of artist-controlled 1970s popular
music. Defining the hopes and dreams of a generation, Gaye’s relevance
persists due to the lasting mark his talent left on US and transnational
popular culture. A performer whose career spanned the histories of R&B,
from doo-wop to soul music, Gaye’s artistic scope and emotional range
became the soundtrack for the tumultuous 1970s.
Named after his father, a minister in the Apostolic Church, the spiritual
influence of Gaye’s early years played a seminal role in his career, especially
from the 1970s on, when his songwriting shifted between secular and
religious topics. Gaye abandoned a place in his father’s church choir to
team up with Don Covay and Billy Stewart in the R&B vocal group the
Rainbows. Gaye’s ascendance, from a black church in Washington, DC, to
the artistic climax of his album What’s Going On? (1971), reflected urban
US cultural tensions and persistent tribulations concerning racism, drugs,
and economic injustice, as Gaye’s and others’ art reflected US hardships,
echoing German philosopher Theodor Adorno’s claim that art reflects
what society prefers to forget.12 Merging spirituality and sexuality in his
life and music, infusing popular culture with the cultural politics of race,
gender, sexuality, class, and nation, Gaye’s legacy as a musician and coun-
tercultural figure continues as he remains a prominent and influential sym-
bol of musical and extra-musical significance.
Gaye began singing professionally as a member of the Rainbows, a
Washington-based doo-wop group. In 1960, he moved to Detroit, was
signed to Motown Records, and made solo recordings for the Motown
subsidiary Tamla Records in the mold of a jazz-pop ballad singer.
Recording youth-oriented R&B, many of his hits were gospel-influenced
dance tunes. Gaye sang a series of duets, played the drums for Motown
sessions, and co-wrote Martha and the Vandellas’ hit “Dancing in the
Streets” (1964).
In 1965, Gaye dropped the call-and-response vocal arrangements of his
earlier hits and began to record in a more sophisticated style. “How Sweet
It Is (To Be Loved By You)” represented his new direction. This was fol-
lowed by two successive R&B number-one hits, “I’ll Be Doggone” and
“Ain’t That Peculiar” (both 1965). Gaye’s status as Motown’s best-selling
male vocalist left him free to pursue more esoteric ventures on his albums,
which in 1965 included a tribute to the late Nat “King” Cole and a collec-
tion of Broadway standards. To exploit his image as a ladies’ man, Motown
teamed Gaye with their leading female vocalist, and one of Motown’s first
singing superstars, Mary Wells (1943–1992), who helped define the
emerging, early 1960s Motown sound. With the Supremes, the Miracles,
the Temptations, and the Four Tops, Wells was part of the change that saw
black music finding its way onto the radio stations and record shelves of
mainstream US culture, crossing the color line existing in music at the
time. With a string of hit singles composed mainly by Smokey Robinson,
including “Two Lovers” (1962), the Grammy-nominated “You Beat Me
to the Punch” (1962), and her signature hit “My Guy” (1964), Wells
became known as the “Queen of Motown” until her departure from the
company in 1964, at the height of her popularity.
When Wells left Motown in 1964, Gaye recorded with Kim Weston
until 1967, when she was succeeded by Tammi Terrell. The Gaye/Terrell
partnership represented the pinnacle of the soul duet, as their voices sen-
sually blended on hits written for the duo by Ashford & Simpson, a soul
duo and songwriting and production team. In the mid-1960s, Gaye’s duet
recordings took precedence over his solo work, but in 1968 he issued the
classic “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” featuring a tense, portentous
rhythm arrangement and Gaye’s emotional vocals. Representing a land-
mark in Motown histories, “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” became
the label’s biggest-selling record to date.
Embarking on a new stage in his career, insisting on total artistic con-
trol of every aspect of his recordings, and inspired by Isaac Hayes’s Hot
Buttered Soul (Stax, 1969), Gaye recorded the conceptually unified album
What’s Going On (1971). Considered soul music’s greatest album, in
What’s Going On Gaye combined early 1970s percussive style with a jazz
sensibility and touches of classical string writing, and in the process pro-
duced a work of profound and lasting political-cultural significance. What’s
Going On was a conceptual masterpiece, and each track contributed to a
type of spiritual yearning and political awakening in songs sung by Gaye
and imbued in his audience, as the album addressed such issues as poverty
and the Vietnam War.
In addition to the title song, “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology),” and
the anthem “Inner City Blues (Makes Me Wanna Holla),” there were Top
10 pop and R&B hits. Producing correspondingly innovatory and com-
plex material, Gaye combined his spiritual beliefs with his increasing con-
cerns about economic injustice, discrimination, and political corruption in
80 A. LEFKOVITZ
the US. Gaye also evolved a new musical style, influencing a generation of

black performers. Built on a heavy percussive base, Gaye’s arrangements
fused jazz and classical influences with his soul roots, creating a fluid
instrumental backdrop for his sensual, passionate vocals. Commenting on
the 1972 US presidential election campaign with the single “You’re the
Man,” Gaye composed the soundtrack to the Blaxploitation thriller
Trouble Man (1972), a primarily instrumental score emphasizing his jazz
interests. In his next project, Gaye shifted from the spiritual to the sexual
with the album Let’s Get It On (1973), including a quote from T.S. Eliot
on the sleeve and centering the art of talking a woman into bed. The title
track of the I Want You (1976) album was an additional number-one hit
on the soul charts, as was Gaye’s disco extravaganza “Got To Give It Up”
(1977). Gaye re-emerged in 1982 with the single “Sexual Healing,” com-
bining his passionate soul vocals with a contemporary electro-disco back-
ing, and the single’s success heralded a new era in Gaye’s music.
Gaye’s vast corpus has often been reduced to “I Heard It Through the
Grapevine,” What’s Going On, Let’s Get It On, and “Sexual Healing.” In a
broader sense, Gaye’s releases represent black popular music’s develop-
ment from raw R&B to sophisticated soul, early 1970s’ political aware-
ness, and then to an increased concentration on personal and sexual
politics. Gaye’s vocal range and fluency influenced soul vocalists, and his
lover-man persona, echoing Al Green, Barry White, and Isaac Hayes, has
been copied and parodied. As he took the standard three-minute pop-soul
song and expanded the format, Gaye became responsible for contempo-
rary urban R&B. Ahead of and reflecting his times, Gaye explored a range
of emotions as he gained critical and commercial success and profoundly
influenced the course of black popular music.13
Donny Hathaway
The best-known single of R&B and soul singer, pianist, songwriter, and
arranger Donny Hathaway (1935–1979) as a solo artist was “The Ghetto”
(1970), chronicling US inner-city life. With later solo recordings featuring
his soulful, melismatic vocals and intricate keyboard work, Hathaway found
his greatest commercial success with his duet partner, singer and songwriter
Roberta Flack (1939–). Flack won a music scholarship to attend Howard
University in 1954. After working as a music educator in public schools in
Washington, DC, she rose to national attention in 1969–1970 when her
first album, First Take (1969), sold over a million copies. Flack’s second
album, Chap. 2 (1970), was a critical and commercial success, and the fol-
lowing year she was chosen as leading female vocalist by DownBeat Magazine.
Flack’s early 1970s hit singles included “The First Time Ever I Saw
Your Face” (number one, 1972) and “Killing Me Softly With His Song”
(number one, 1973), which won the Grammy for Best Song. These were
typical of Flack’s intimate ballad style, influenced by gospel and soul music
in her vocal ornamentation, and by jazz in her use of vocal color. Flack’s
singles included some made in collaboration with Hathaway, and their
albums consistently scored highly in the charts through the 1970s and
1980s. Blue Light in the Basement was among the ten best-selling albums
of 1978. Flack had a few hits in the early 1980s. Her popularity declined
by the end of the decade, yet she continued to perform widely into the
twenty-first century, touring South Africa and Australia.
Percy Mayfield
“Poet of the blues,” one of R&B’s most individual voices, and a gifted per-
former, with a rich, soulful voice, Los Angeles-based Percy Mayfield
(1920–1984) first gained success in 1950 with “Please Send Me Someone
to Love.” A massive R&B hit, this became an enduring composition through
its many cover versions, including one by Ray Charles. Additional chart
entries, such as “Lost Love” (1951) and “Big Question” (1952), solidified
Mayfield’s status, but a terrifying car accident suffered in 1953 dramatically
curtailed Mayfield’s solo career and cost him his matinee-idol looks.
Thereafter, Mayfield’s songwriting took on darker themes, with such
songs as “My Jug And I” and “My Bottle Is My Companion” reflecting
his problems with alcohol. In the 1960s, “Hit the Road Jack” improved
Mayfield’s standing as a gifted composer when it became a transnational
hit for Ray Charles, who recorded several of Mayfield’s songs while
Mayfield pursued his career on Charles’s Tangerine record label. Mayfield
secured a US Top 100 hit in 1963 with “The River’s Invitation.” This
downbeat, pathos-laden narrative reflected Mayfield’s bleak outlook.
Mayfield remained active in the 1970s and early 1980s, with later work
appearing on multiple labels.
Gil Scott-Heron
Poet, musician, and one of the first rappers, Gil Scott-Heron (1949–2011)
first gained notoriety with poetry emphasizing African-Americans’ realities
and inequalities in early 1970s US culture. In 1970, Scott-Heron became
82 A. LEFKOVITZ
part of the Midnight Band, performing a mixture of jazz, soul, and proto-
typical rap music. Scott-Heron was at the forefront of the Black Arts
Movement.14 An era of artistic and literary development among African-
Americans in the 1960s and early 1970s, the Black Arts Movement was
based on the cultural politics of black nationalism, developed into a set of
theories referred to as the Black Aesthetic. The Black Arts Movement
sought to create a populist art form to promote the idea of black separat-
ism. Adherents viewed the artist as an activist, responsible for the forma-
tion of racially separate publishing houses, theatre troupes, and study
groups. The movement’s literature, written in black English vernacular
and perceived as confrontational in tone, addressed such US cultural issues
as interracial tensions, sociopolitical awareness, and the relevance of
African histories and cultures to African Americans.
Leading Black Arts Movement theorists include Houston A. Baker, Jr.,
Carolyn M. Rodgers, Addison Gayle, Jr., editor of the anthology The Black
Aesthetic (1971), Hoyt W. Fuller, editor of the journal Negro Digest (which
became Black World in 1970), and LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal, editors of
Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing (1968). Jones, later
known as Amiri Baraka, wrote the critically acclaimed play Dutchman
(1964) and founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre in Harlem (1965).
Haki R. Madhubuti, known as Don L. Lee until 1973, became one of the
Black Arts Movement’s most popular writers. Other writers engaging with
the Black Arts Movement were Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, Ntozake
Shange, Sonia Sanchez, Alice Walker, and June Jordan.
Predating hip hop culture, Gil Scott-Heron’s early “raps” included
“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” an attack on ways a white-
supremacist US media manipulates and distorts, “Sex Education Ghetto
Style,” and “The Get Out of the Ghetto Blues,” heard on his debut album,
Small Talk at 125th and Lenox (1970), mostly an album of poems. Later
albums showed Scott-Heron developing into a skilled songwriter, and in
1973 he had a minor hit with “The Bottle,” a song inspired by a group of
alcoholics who congregated outside the Washington, DC communal house
where he was staying. While “Winter In America” and “The First Minute
of a New Day” were heavily jazz-influenced, later sets saw Scott-Heron
exploring more pop-oriented formats, and in 1976 he achieved a hit with
the disco-based protest single “Johannesburg.”
By the 1980s, Scott-Heron’s songs addressed nuclear disarmament,
the Watergate scandal, Iran, poverty, drugs, and racial injustice. Scott-
Heron’s strongest songs were political diatribes in which he confronted
issues and made caustic attacks on US politicians, such as Richard Nixon,

Gerald Ford, Barry Goldwater, Jimmy Carter, and his anti-Reagan rap,
“B-Movie” (1982). His 1980s records included as much singing as
recital, and Scott-Heron published two novels (The Vulture [1970] and
The Nigger Factory [1972]). A cutting, humorous satirist with a soulful
voice, Scott-Heron described himself as an interpreter of the African-
American experience.15
Curtis Mayfield
The Chicago-based soul vocal group the Impressions were formed in
1957 in Chicago and consisted of soul and funk singer, guitarist, song-
writer, and producer Curtis Mayfield (1942–1999), Jerry Butler, Sam
Gooden, and brothers Richard and Arthur Brooks. Mayfield and Butler
first met in the choir of the Traveling Soul Spiritualists Church, from
where they formed the Modern Jubilaires and Northern Jubilee Singers.
Their group’s first single, the ballad “For Your Precious Love,” was a sub-
stantial hit, reaching number 11 in the US pop chart in June 1958. The
great soul recording “It’s All Right” (1963) went to number one in the
R&B chart and number four in the pop chart. With the group’s rhythmic
harmonies set against stylish arrangements, Top 20 singles included “I’m
So Proud” and “You Must Believe Me” (both 1964).
The Impressions’ compositions illuminate how Mayfield was growing
as a razor-sharp composer, creating lyrical, poignant, and dynamic songs.
Although Mayfield and the Impressions came from a gospel background,
early tracks, such as “Grow Closer Together” and “You Must Believe in
Me,” are characterized by doo-wop-flavored vocals and blaring brass
arrangements. The Impressions’ first four albums represent sweet soul
music’s best, featuring uplifting, sympathetic, yet non-sentimental com-
positions. Led by Mayfield’s talent for songwriting, guitar playing, and
production, the Impressions defined the Chicago soul sound and achieved
success through the 1960s. Their records feature extensive use of falsetto,
a combination of clipped rhythm guitar and bright lead guitar, pizzicato, a
playing technique that involves plucking instruments’ strings, metallic
timbres from vibraphone and glockenspiel, brass (instead of saxophones),
instrumental vamps in place of solos, and an interplay of their multiple
lead vocals, evoking structures of feeling that would keep them alive in the
memories of fans for decades. Earlier songs, such as “Keep on Pushing”
(1964) and “People Get Ready” (1965), a song Bob Marley would take
84 A. LEFKOVITZ
lyrics from for his “One Love/People Get Ready” (1977), reflected the
Civil Rights Movement’s spirit.
As the Impressions’ songwriter and vocalist, Mayfield gained a reputa-
tion as one of soul music’s most perceptive and natural talents. Between
1961 and 1971, he composed a succession of classic singles for his group.
Subjects ranged from simple, tender love songs to demands for political
and social equality. As leader of the Impressions, Mayfield brought a lyri-
cism to soul music. When Mayfield went solo in 1970, his trademarks were
a lilting falsetto and classy recording techniques, resulting in lush orches-
trations and sweeping productions, echoing Barry White (1944–2003),
the African-American R&B singer who possessed one of the most recog-
nizable bass-baritone voices in the music world, and who was especially
popular in the 1970s disco era, which he helped set in motion with his
Love Unlimited Orchestra’s “Love’s Theme” instrumental (1973). White
half-sang and half-spoke romantic ballads in sensual tones that, with lush
orchestrations, created intimate, seductive moods.
As he left the Impressions to pursue a solo career that would eventually
make him a major player in black popular music, smooth and classy soul-
ster Mayfield became one of soul music’s great writer-performers, com-
posing a string of superlative soul singles, from the anti-racist “Mighty,
Mighty Spade & Whitey” (1971) to the sociopolitical “Future Shock”
(1973), the disco-influenced “No Goodbyes” (1978), and the sensuality
of “Between You Baby and Me” (1979), highlighting his stylistic border
crossing. Emerging from a period when Motown Records provided a
prime influence, “This Is My Country” (1968) and “Check Out Your
Mind” (1970) were more politically based compositions.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, Mayfield created the Chicago soul sound.
Coming to prominence performing on and writing a number of hits by
the Impressions between 1958 and 1970, beginning in 1960 with the top-
ten hit “He Will Break Your Heart,” Mayfield pursued a career writing,
producing, and playing on records by other Chicago artists and, in the
1970s, Detroit-based Aretha Franklin and the Staple Singers, a vocal
group that was one of the most successful gospel-to-pop crossover acts,
collecting several Top 20 hits in the early 1970s.
Less concerned with melody, Mayfield’s songs, such as “Move on Up”
(1970), highlight rhythm and texture with auxiliary percussion, such as
the conga, wah-wah guitar, and dramatic and ubiquitous strings. Mayfield’s
most successful solo works, both commercially and aesthetically, came
between 1970 and 1973. Starting with his soundtrack for one of the era’s
most popular Blaxploitation films, Superfly (1972), setting new standards

for soul music, and featuring the hit song “Freddie’s Dead,” a million-
selling single, Mayfield helped pioneer music for black-oriented films. His
other film credits include Claudine (1974), Sparkle (1976), A Piece of the
Action (1977), and Short Eyes (1977).
Mayfield gained a statesmanlike role in black popular music, supporting
other artists as composer, producer, and session guitarist. Beginning his
solo career and commercial ascendancy with the US Top 30 hit “(Don’t
Worry) If There’s a Hell Below We’re All Going to Go” (1970), a biting
protest song, Mayfield had a massive influence on soul music. A gifted
songwriter with a sweet and unique voice, most of his work advocated
peace, love, and freedom. As a solo artist, Mayfield chronicled US cultural
injustices and the realities of its street culture. With a talent for combining
light melodies with simple but chilling wordplay, Mayfield joined soul
music histories’ heroic figures, including Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Ray
Charles, and Aretha Franklin. A primary architect of 1960s soul, Mayfield’s
background, like that of his peers, was in gospel, yet he became famous
performing secular music. Politically explicit, inclusive, and hopeful,
Mayfield fused soul and funk in the 1970s. In the midst of the violence
and chaos of the 1960s and drugs and exploitation of the 1970s, Mayfield
maintained a type of aesthetic beauty while imbuing his songs with a polit-
icization that did not hide his era’s realities. Influencing such musical rev-
olutionaries as Public Enemy, a US rap group whose dense, layered sound
and political messages made them among the most popular, controversial,
and influential late-1980s and early-90s hip hop artists,16 Mayfield com-
bined serious topics with his romantic side, as his arrangements took on an
increasing sophistication as his career proceeded.17
Notes
1. Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
2. Peter Broadbent, Charlie Christian: Solo Flight: The Story of the Seminal
Electric Guitarist (Blaydon on Tyne: Ashley Mark, 2003); Wayne E. Goins
and Craig R. McKinney, A Biography of Charlie Christian, Jazz Guitar’s
King of Swing (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005).
3. D. Antoinette Handy, The International Sweethearts of Rhythm: The Ladies
Jazz Band from Piney Woods Country Life School (Lanham, MD; London:
Scarecrow Press, 1998); Sherrie Tucker, “Nobody’s Sweethearts: Gender,
86 A. LEFKOVITZ
Race, Jazz, and the Darlings of Rhythm,” American Music 16.3 (Autumn,
1998): 255–288; Sherrie Tucker, “Telling Performances: Jazz History
Remembered and Remade by the Women in the Band,” Oral History
Review 26.1 (Winter–Spring, 1999): 67–84; Sherrie Tucker, Swing Shift:
“All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
4. Linda Dahl, Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams (New York:
Pantheon Books, 2000); D. Antoinette Handy and Mary Lou Williams,
“First Lady of the Jazz Keyboard,” The Black Perspective in Music 8.2
(Autumn, 1980): 194–214; Tammy Lynn Kernodle, “This Is My Story,
This Is My Song: The Historiography of Vatican II, Black Catholic Identity,
Jazz, and the Religious Compositions of Mary Lou Williams,” U.S. Catholic
Historian 19.2, African American Spirituality and Liturgical Renewal
(Spring, 2001): 83–94; Tammy Lynn Kernodle, Soul on Soul: The Life and
Music of Mary Lou Williams (Boston: Northeastern University Press,
2004); Gayle Murchison, “Mary Lou Williams’s Hymn ‘Black Christ of
the Andes (St. Martin de Porres),’ Vatican II, Civil Rights, and Jazz as
Sacred Music,” Musical Quarterly 86.4 (Winter, 2002): 591–629;
Kimberly Hannon Teal, “Posthumously Live: Canon Formation at Jazz at
Lincoln Center Through the Case of Mary Lou Williams,” American
Music 32.4 (Winter 2014): 400–422.
5. James Lincoln Collier, Benny Goodman and the Swing Era (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1989); D. Russell Connor, Benny Goodman:
Listen to His Legacy (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press and the Institute of
Jazz Studies, 1988); D. Russell Connor, Benny Goodman: Wrappin’ It Up
(Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996); Ross Firestone, Swing, Swing,
Swing: The Life & Times of Benny Goodman (New York: Norton, 1993).
6. Lewis Erenberg, Swingin’ the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of
American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Gunther
Schuller, The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930–1945 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1991); David Stowe, Swing Changes: Big-Band
Jazz in New Deal America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).
7. Jonathan Bellman, “Indian Resonances in the British Invasion, 1965–
1968,” Journal of Musicology 15.1 (Winter, 1997): 116–136; Nicholas
Schaffner, The British Invasion: From the First Wave to the New Wave (New
York; Hamburg; Paris: McGraw-Hill, 1983).
8. Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley (Boston:
Little, Brown, 1994); Peter Guralnick, Careless Love: The Unmaking of
Elvis Presley (Boston: Little, Brown, 1999); Greil Marcus, Dead Elvis: A
Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1999).
9. Stuart L. Goosman, Group Harmony: The Black Urban Roots of Rhythm
and Blues (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); David
Grazian, Blue Chicago: The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues Clubs
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); David Grazian, “The
Jazzman’s True Academy: Ethnography, Artistic Work and the Chicago
Blues Scene,” Ethnologie Française, Nouvelle Serie 38.1, L’Art au Travail
(Janvier–Mars 2008): 49–57; D.J. Hatch and D.R. Watson, “Hearing the
Blues: An Essay in the Sociology of Music,” Acta Sociologica 17.2 (1974):
162–178; Charles Keil, Urban Blues (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1966); Jon Michael Spencer, “The Diminishing Rural Residue of
Folklore in City and Urban Blues, Chicago 1915–1950,” Black Music
Research Journal 12.1 (Spring, 1992): 25–41.
10. Geoff Brown, The Life of James Brown: A Biography (London: Omnibus
Press, 2009); James Brown and Bruce Tucker, James Brown, The Godfather
of Soul (London: Head of Zeus, 2014); Nelson George and Alan Leeds,
The James Brown Reader: Fifty Years of Writing About the Godfather of Soul
(New York: Plume, 2008); James McBride, Kill ‘Em and Leave: Searching
for James Brown and the American Soul (New York: Spiegel & Grau,
2016); Cynthia Rose, Living in America: The Soul Saga of James Brown
(London: Serpent’s Tail, 1990); R.J. Smith, The One: The Life and Music
of James Brown (New York: Gotham Books, 2012).
11. Rob Bowman, “The Stax Sound: A Musicological Analysis,” Popular Music
14.3 (Oct., 1995): 285–320; Rob Bowman, Soulsville, U.S.A.: The Story of
Stax Records (New York: Schirmer Trade Books, 2003); Robert Gordon,
Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion (New York:
Bloomsbury, 2015).
12. Theodor W. Adorno and Robert Hullot-Kentor, Philosophy of New Music
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
13. Michael Eric Dyson, Mercy, Mercy Me: The Art, Loves and Demons of
Marvin Gaye (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2008); Jon Fitzgerald,
“Motown Crossover Hits 1963–1966 and the Creative Process,” Popular
Music 14.1 (Jan., 1995): 1–11; Jan Gaye and David Ritz, After the Dance:
My Life with Marvin Gaye (New York: Amistad, an Imprint of HarperCollins
Publishers, 2015); Chris Quispel, “Detroit, City of Cars, City of Music,”
Built Environment (1978–) 31.3, Music and the City (2005): 226–236;
David Ritz, Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye (Cambridge, MA: Da
Capo Press, 2009).
14. Lisa Gail Collins and Margo Natalie Crawford, New Thoughts on the Black
Arts Movement (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006);
Marvin J. Gladney, “The Black Arts Movement and Hip-Hop,” African
American Review 29.2 (Summer, 1995): 291–301; James Edward
Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s
and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
88 A. LEFKOVITZ
15. Marcus Baram, Gil Scott-Heron: Pieces of a Man (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 2014); Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Black Chant: Languages of African-
American Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997).
16. Nelson George, Hip Hop America (New York: Viking, 1998); Russell
Myrie, Don’t Rhyme for the Sake of Riddlin’: The Authorised Story of Public
Enemy (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2008); Robert Walser, “Rhythm, Rhyme,
and Rhetoric in the Music of Public Enemy,” Ethnomusicology 39.2
(Spring–Summer, 1995): 193–217.
17. Jon Fitzgerald, “Black Pop Songwriting 1963–1966: An Analysis of
U.S. Top Forty Hits by Cooke, Mayfield, Stevenson, Robinson, and
Holland-Dozier-Holland,” Black Music Research Journal 27.2 (Fall,
2007): 97–140; Craig Hansen Werner, Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder,
Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield and the Rise and Fall of American Soul
(New York: Crown Publishers, 2004); Robert Pruter, Chicago Soul
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); James B. Stewart, “Message
in the Music: Political Commentary in Black Popular Music from Rhythm
and Blues to Early Hip Hop,” Journal of African American History 90.3,
The History of Hip Hop (Summer, 2005): 196–225.
Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor W., and Robert Hullot-Kentor. Philosophy of New Music.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
Baram, Marcus. Gil Scott-Heron: Pieces of a Man. New York: St. Martin’s Press,
2014.
Bellman, Jonathan. “Indian Resonances in the British Invasion, 1965–1968.”
Journal of Musicology 15.1 (Winter, 1997): 116–136.
Bowman, Rob. “The Stax Sound: A Musicological Analysis.” Popular Music 14.3
(Oct., 1995): 285–320.
———. Soulsville, U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records. New York: Schirmer Trade
Books, 2003.
Broadbent, Peter. Charlie Christian: Solo Flight: The Story of the Seminal Electric
Guitarist. Blaydon on Tyne: Ashley Mark, 2003.
Brown, Geoff. The Life of James Brown: A Biography. London: Omnibus Press,
2009.
Brown, James, and Bruce Tucker. James Brown, The Godfather of Soul. London:
Head of Zeus, 2014.
Collier, James Lincoln. Benny Goodman and the Swing Era. New York: Oxford
Collins, Lisa Gail, and Margo Natalie Crawford. New Thoughts on the Black Arts
Movement. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006.
Connor, D. Russell. Benny Goodman: Listen to His Legacy. Metuchen, NJ:
Scarecrow Press and the Institute of Jazz Studies, 1988.
———. Benny Goodman: Wrappin’ It Up. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996.
Dahl, Linda. Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams. New York:
Pantheon Books, 2000.
Dyson, Michael Eric. Mercy, Mercy Me: The Art, Loves and Demons of Marvin Gaye.
New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2008.
Erenberg, Lewis. Swingin’ the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American
Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Firestone, Ross. Swing, Swing, Swing: The Life & Times of Benny Goodman.
New York: Norton, 1993.
Fitzgerald, Jon. “Motown Crossover Hits 1963–1966 and the Creative Process.”
Popular Music 14.1 (Jan., 1995): 1–11.
———. “Black Pop Songwriting 1963–1966: An Analysis of U.S. Top Forty Hits
by Cooke, Mayfield, Stevenson, Robinson, and Holland-Dozier-Holland.”
Black Music Research Journal 27.2 (Fall, 2007): 97–140.
Gaye, Jan, and David Ritz. After the Dance: My Life with Marvin Gaye. New York:
Amistad, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2015.
George, Nelson. Hip Hop America. New York: Viking, 1998.
George, Nelson, and Alan Leeds. The James Brown Reader: Fifty Years of Writing
About the Godfather of Soul. New York: Plume, 2008.
Gladney, Marvin J. “The Black Arts Movement and Hip-Hop.” African American
Review 29.2 (Summer, 1995): 291–301.
Goins, Wayne E., and Craig R. McKinney. A Biography of Charlie Christian, Jazz
Guitar’s King of Swing. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005.
Goosman, Stuart L. Group Harmony: The Black Urban Roots of Rhythm and Blues.
Gordon, Robert. Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion. New York:
Bloomsbury, 2015.
Grazian, David. Blue Chicago: The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues Clubs.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008a.
———. “The Jazzman’s True Academy: Ethnography, Artistic Work and the
Chicago Blues Scene.” Ethnologie Française, Nouvelle Serie 38.1, L’Art au
Travail (Janvier–Mars, 2008b): 49–57.
Guralnick, Peter. Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley. Boston: Little,
Brown, 1994.
———. Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley. Boston: Little, Brown, 1999.
Handy, D. Antoinette. The International Sweethearts of Rhythm: The Ladies Jazz
Band from Piney Woods Country Life School. Lanham, MD; London: Scarecrow
Press, 1998.
Handy, D. Antoinette, and Mary Lou Williams. “First Lady of the Jazz Keyboard.”
The Black Perspective in Music 8.2 (Autumn, 1980): 194–214.
90 A. LEFKOVITZ
Hansen Werner, Craig. Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis
Mayfield and the Rise and Fall of American Soul. New York: Crown Publishers,
2004.
Hatch, D.J., and D.R. Watson. “Hearing the Blues: An Essay in the Sociology of
Music.” Acta Sociologica 17.2 (1974): 162–178.
Keil, Charles. Urban Blues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.
Kernodle, Tammy Lynn. “This Is My Story, This Is My Song: The Historiography
of Vatican II, Black Catholic Identity, Jazz, and the Religious Compositions of
Mary Lou Williams.” U.S. Catholic Historian 19.2, African American Spirituality
and Liturgical Renewal (Spring, 2001): 83–94.
———. Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams. Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 2004.
Marcus, Greil. Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession. Cambridge, MA:
McBride, James. Kill ‘Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American
Soul. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2016.
McClary, Susan. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
Michael Spencer, Jon. “The Diminishing Rural Residue of Folklore in City and
Urban Blues, Chicago 1915–1950.” Black Music Research Journal 12.1
(Spring, 1992): 25–41.
Murchison, Gayle. “Mary Lou Williams’s Hymn ‘Black Christ of the Andes (St.
Martin de Porres):’ Vatican II, Civil Rights, and Jazz as Sacred Music.” Musical
Quarterly 86.4 (Winter, 2002): 591–629.
Myrie, Russell. Don’t Rhyme for the Sake of Riddlin’: The Authorised Story of Public
Enemy. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2008
Nielsen, Aldon Lynn. Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Pruter, Robert. Chicago Soul. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992.
Quispel, Chris. “Detroit, City of Cars, City of Music.” Built Environment (1978–)
31.3, Music and the City, 2005: 226–236.
Ritz, David. Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo
Press, 2009.
Rose, Cynthia. Living in America: The Soul Saga of James Brown. London:
Serpent’s Tail, 1990.
Schaffner, Nicholas. The British Invasion: From the First Wave to the New Wave.
New York; Hamburg; Paris: McGraw-Hill, 1983.
Schuller, Gunther. The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930–1945. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1991.
Smethurst, James Edward. The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the
1960s and 1970s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.
Smith, R.J. The One: The Life and Music of James Brown. New York: Gotham
Books, 2012.
Stewart, James B. “Message in the Music: Political Commentary in Black Popular
Music from Rhythm and Blues to Early Hip Hop.” Journal of African American
History 90.3, The History of Hip Hop (Summer, 2005): 196–225.
Stowe, David. Swing Changes: Big-Band Jazz in New Deal America. Cambridge:
Teal, Kimberly Hannon. “Posthumously Live: Canon Formation at Jazz at Lincoln
Center Through the Case of Mary Lou Williams.” American Music 32.4
(Winter, 2014): 400–422.
Tucker, Sherrie. “Nobody’s Sweethearts: Gender, Race, Jazz, and the Darlings of
Rhythm.” American Music 16.3 (Autumn, 1998): 255–288.
———. “Telling Performances: Jazz History Remembered and Remade by the
Women in the Band.” Oral History Review 26.1 (Winter–Spring, 1999):
67–84.
———. Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s. Durham: Duke University
Press, 2000.
Walser, Robert. “Rhythm, Rhyme, and Rhetoric in the Music of Public Enemy.”
Ethnomusicology 39.2 (Spring–Summer, 1995): 193–217.
CHAPTER 4
Jimi Hendrix, the 1960s Counterculture,

and Confirmations and Critiques of US
Cultural Mythologies
Abstract This chapter centers Hendrix’s contested US national identity

and participation in a visual-cultural and popular musical Black Atlantic
that has been confined within, while maneuvering beyond, the slave trade’s
borders. Centering Hendrix within a legacy of black popular music’s trans-
national routes, this chapter highlights his musical and extra-musical roles
as a transnational symbol. This chapter places Hendrix, and rock music
more generally, in histories of the 1960s counterculture (especially the
Woodstock Festival), US exceptionalist myths, and the cultural Cold War.
Keywords Cultural Cold War • Orientalism • Hetero-Patriarchy

• Soviet Union
Though jazz, blues, soul, reggae, and hip hop are perceived as generically,
uniquely, and “quintessentially” American, such globally routed artists as
Hendrix, Chuck Berry, and Bob Marley, questioning and reinforcing the
US cultural allure and desire for mobility and speed, and broadening US
national “values” of individualism and freedom, have been drained of their
moral power through their hyper-capitalization and ubiquitous, pre-
political, racialized, gendered, and hyper-sexualized visual-cultural images.
Hendrix’s racial, gender, sexual, national, and international representa-
tional struggles were part of his contested US and transnational identities
and participation in a visual-cultural, popular musical, gendered, and

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77013-0_4
94 A. LEFKOVITZ
sexualized Black Atlantic that has been confined within, while maneuver-
ing beyond, the slave trade’s borders. As Hendrix, through his subversive
popular musical, racial, gender, sexual, national, and transnational border
crossing, challenged and confronted the US during the 1960s countercul-
tural era, in his visual-cultural reductions Hendrix was subsumed by the
US and broader culture industrial networks. Part of a legacy of black pop-
ular music’s subversive and co-opted transnational identities, Hendrix per-
formed conflicting musical and extra-musical roles as a black-transnational
symbol whose national belonging was anything but fixed.
Even so, Hendrix has been used to justify rock’s privileged place as a
quintessential US genre. Like jazz before it, rock and its machismo and
aggressive beats have been characterized as signifying the best of US cul-
ture—in all its restlessness, ingenuity, mobility, and democratic ethos.
However, Hendrix, like Josephine Baker, Nina Simone, James Baldwin,
and numerous other black-transnational, rebel sojourners, discovered
racial, gender, and sexual emancipation in Europe, finding safe spaces and
room for alternative racial, gender, and sexual expressions far from Jim
Crow codes and conventions.
Part of histories of black-transnational performers engaging in resistant
and commodified international political and musical exchanges transvers-
ing the Black Atlantic and beyond, Hendrix enters a discussion of the
violent and revolutionary decade of the 1960s, with his and other forms of
progressive rock becoming the prime organs of communication within the
counterculture.1 Hendrix’s mainstream and subversive performances and
participation in such iconic events as Woodstock, where he performed his
famed rendition/deconstruction of “The Star-Spangled Banner” as a pro-
test against the Vietnam War, and as the guitarist was increasingly pres-
sured by different causes, center Hendrix and rock music more generally
in histories of US exceptionalist myths, especially as they relate to rock
music and the cultural Cold War. Hendrix can be understood in a broader
context of mid-twentieth-century US and transnational political and cul-
tural histories, including presidential involvement in such racially charged
incidents as the violence surrounding the Little Rock Nine, when African-
American high-school students challenged racial segregation in Little
Rock, Arkansas’s public schools, and post-World War II gospel and blues
music, highlighting themes at the heart of the Cold War era.
JIMI HENDRIX, THE 1960S COUNTERCULTURE, AND CONFIRMATIONS… 95
Hendrix, Woodstock, and a Legacy of Black-

Transnational Countercultural Music
Closing the Woodstock Festival, during which he performed his famed
critique of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” epitomizing the subversive music,
culture, and politics of the countercultural era, Hendrix, in his aesthetic
interpretations, was building on a foundation reaching back to the Delta
blues tradition and revolutionary guitar playing of Howlin’ Wolf and other
great Chicago bluesmen. In its introduction, unaccompanied “talking”
guitar passage, and inserted calls and responses at key points in his rendi-
tion, Hendrix’s performance of the national anthem also hearkened back
to a tradition older than the blues, rooted in the rings of dance, drum, and
song shared by peoples across Africa, and to the ways black popular music
has been an explicitly political expression, highlighting categories, reali-
ties, and inequalities of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and nation.
The Woodstock Music and Art Fair, the most famous of the 1960s rock
festivals, was held on a farm property in Bethel, New York from August
15th–18th, 1969. A seminal event exemplifying the ways US culture and
the ideals and priorities of a generation were shifting, how that generation
was finding its voice through music, and featuring some of the era’s big-
gest musical stars, Woodstock was organized by inexperienced promoters
who signed a who’s who of contemporary rock acts. Almost immediately,
the festival began to go wrong, when the towns of Woodstock and Wallkill,
New York denied permission to stage it. Still, the name Woodstock was
retained because of the cachet of hipness associated with the town, where
Bob Dylan and other musicians were known to live and which had been
an artists’ retreat since the turn of the twentieth century.
Though few tickets were sold, some 400,000 people showed up, mostly
demanding free entry, which they received due to lax security. While rain
turned the festival site into a sea of mud, the audience bonded, partly due
to the large amounts of marijuana and psychedelics that were consumed.
The festival left its promoters practically bankrupt, yet they did hold on to
the film and recording rights and made their money back when Michael
Wadleigh’s three-hour documentary film Woodstock (1970), creating
imagery resonating with generations of rock fans and focusing on concert-
goers’ experiences alongside musical performances, became a sensation.
As Woodstock’s “Three Days of Peace and Music” became legendary, a
1994 festival on the same site was better organized and more financially
successful. A third festival in 1999 was tainted by a small riot.
96 A. LEFKOVITZ
With the iconic Woodstock Festival achieving mythic status as a

generation- defining event, performances by Crosby, Stills and Nash,
Carlos Santana, Joe Cocker (1944–2014), the British blues-rock singer
who over a more-than-five-decade career made nearly 40 albums and
became one of the most distinctive singers of his generation with his grav-
elly vocals and spasmodic movements, and The Who (performing their
rock opera, Tommy) became important elements of the rock canon.
Acclaimed sets also included Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin
and the Kozmic Blues Band, Sly and the Family Stone, the Jefferson
Airplane, Ravi Shankar, Country Joe and the Fish, folk singer and guitarist
Richie Havens singing “Freedom,” combining improvised lyrics with
those from the song “Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child,” and the
Grateful Dead, the rock band that saw the incarnation of the improvisa-
tional psychedelic music that could be heard in and around mid-1960s
San Francisco, and one of the most successful touring bands in rock histo-
ries despite having had virtually any radio hits.2
Hendrix and US Rock Exceptionalism

Hendrix’s Woodstock performance encapsulated tensions surrounding his
musical persona. While mythologized as the quintessential US rock star,
Hendrix used the power of his exotic image and powerful guitar interpre-
tations to challenge the US nation-state as it was engaging in one of its
most disastrous foreign-policy blunders. Hendrix’s confirmation and dis-
ruption of rock’s utilization in defining a kind of authentic and pure US
exceptionalism, or the entrenched notion that the US has been a divinely
anointed homeland of freedom, bravery, democracy, and economic oppor-
tunity, with everything to teach the world and nothing to learn from it,
illuminates US exceptionalism’s multiple historical manifestations and
contestations.
As nationalistic theories attribute US distinctiveness to inherent, natu-
ral, and God-given cultural characteristics, and mythologies of the unique-
ness of the US “mission” center deeply held beliefs shaping the US creed,
US histories have had their share of class conflict and class formations that
have been exceptional in relation to transnational labor histories.3 The US
labor movement has been weak and politically conservative in comparison
to Western European movements. Though the US labor movement had
much in common with its English and French counterparts for most of the
nineteenth century, with the collapse of the Knights of Labor, at one point
the US’s largest labor organization, the US labor movement took a differ-
ent path.4
The myth of the US’s exceptional place in transnational histories has
had a strong hold on the US imagination. Through the centuries, many
took up this theme to inspire the nation and further their personal political
desires and foreign-policy ambitions, implying a sense of superiority and
fueling racism, hetero-sexism, warmongering, and idolatry. US exception-
alism had theological implications for US civil religion,5 or the notion that
a quasi-religious faith exists in the US, with sacred symbols drawn from
national histories.
US Christians historically and theologically engaged US exceptional-
ism, with some Christians aspiring to patriotism without idolatry.
Alternative models for Christian engagement with the state can move the
conversation toward a higher ideal of kingdom and global citizenship.6 A
pluralistic exceptionalism based on the nation’s continuing struggle for
equality, freedom, and justice rejects the frequently invoked model fram-
ing the US as an innocent nation chosen by God. As they attempt to make
sense of relationships between one’s faith and US exceptionalism, US
Christians wrestle with the dark effects of pursuing a closed, hyper-patriotic
version of exceptionalism, with some claiming that idolatrous forms of
exceptionalism should be rejected as false gospels.7
US exceptionalist mythologies are propagated even as state fantasies
and ideologies of “colorblindness,” equal treatment under the law, “free-
dom,” and “democracy” reveal their inconsistencies. Exceptionalism
advocates are perceived as unrealistically patriotic while critics are labeled
as subversives and enemies of the state. In the development of imperial US
exceptionalism, myths and symbols shaped Americans’ self-perception,
with the “dangerous nation” thesis claiming the US has always been an
ideological, imperial power dedicated to global conquest.8
In ongoing debates concerning the US’s character and what ought to
be its role in the world, the 2008 election of President Obama and appar-
ent decline of US power rekindled questions, such as whether the US can
claim an exceptionalism in its “values” and institutions and in the role it
plays in foreign affairs.9 The Obama election confirmed a racialized US
exceptionalism, when consistent racial injustices were forgotten and a sup-
posedly “post-racial” future began.10 As the Obama election signaled an
apparent US “colorblindness,” US exceptionalism continued. While ideal-
izing itself as exemplary, the nation furthered its missionary crusade in its
98 A. LEFKOVITZ
foreign policy while ignoring pressing, persistent domestic violence and

inequalities.
US exceptionalism played a key role in shaping the US’s position in the
world.11 Part of the break from Europe and the “New World” superpow-
er’s ties to the “Old World,” exceptionalism provided the US with its
distinct cultural shape, separating it from its refined, continental ancestors
and feeding its zeal for an identity tied to the untamed frontier and pri-
mordial, pre-political being, without regard to consensus, cooperation,
empathy, understanding, nonviolence, or entertaining peaceful alterna-
tives. US exceptionalism demonstrated a continued importance to US
mythologies, such as the notion of turning the US from an undeveloped
wilderness, devoid of any Indigenous inhabitants, into an “exceptional”
nation.12 Consistently impacting US foreign policies, exceptionalism was
linked to multiple aspects of US politics and culture. Components of US
exceptionalism include relationships between the state and its citizens,
religion, the presidency, struggles over US histories, film, television,
sports, socioeconomic mobility, the US’s role in the world, and glorified
and contested ideas regarding a frozen, unchanging US Constitution.
US exceptionalism matters in domestic politics as an unchallenged,
assumed narrative around which support for and opposition to certain
policies, parties, and visions of US culture coalesce. In the nexus of US
culture, exceptionalism, and imperialism, September 11th, 2001 did not
signify the beginning of US belligerence and authoritarianism at home
and abroad. Instead, continuities and discontinuities embodied in a
present-day US imperialism were constituted through expressions of
exceptionalism, technological might, and visions of transnational domi-
nance since the US Republic’s founding. An updated missionary excep-
tionalism became visible in the confused, delusional, violent, and disastrous
US policy in the Iraq War,13 also called the Second Persian Gulf War
(2003–2011), a conflict in Iraq that consisted of two phases. The first of
these was a brief, conventionally fought war in March–April 2003, in
which a combined force of troops from the US and Great Britain (with
smaller contingents from several other countries) invaded Iraq and rapidly
defeated Iraqi military and paramilitary forces. This was followed by a
longer, second phase in which a US-led occupation of Iraq was opposed
by an insurgency. While the number of Iraqis who died during the conflict
is uncertain, one late 2006 estimate put the total at more than 650,000
between the US-led invasion and October 2006, but other reported
estimates put the figures for the same period at about 40,000 to 50,000.
After violence began to decline in 2007, the US gradually reduced its mili-
tary presence in Iraq, formally completing its withdrawal in December
2011.
Cultural critics and politicians draw parallels between the 1950s and
1960s communist threat and twenty-first-century securitocracies and cul-
tures of surveillance, the Bush era “axis of evil,” and Islamophobia.14 In
changes and continuities between the twenty-first-century imperial
moment and economic, political, and cultural US imperial histories, the
cultural affirmation and attendant psychological and sociological ramifica-
tions of US exceptionalist claims are highlighted. In subtle and explicit
ways, as an apparent purveyor of freedom and democracy, the tentacles of
US hegemony, “soft power,” and explicit violence affected various trans-
national populations. The US experience has been defined by exceptional-
ist rhetoric as it manifested across a range of contexts, with US exceptionalist
ideologies used, adapted, challenged, and rejected.
Critics contend that US exceptionalist mythologies led the nation
astray. Americans’ reading of their national experience as exceptional
allowed that belief to warp their transnational interactions. The US’s belief
in its economic, political, cultural, and moral exceptionalism reinforced
inequalities and hubris. US exceptionalism hindered rational thinking
about the nation and its place in the world among those using the idea to
project US military, economic, political, and cultural dominance. The idea
that the US was destined to spread its unique gifts of untainted, uncor-
rupted, and morally good democracy and free-market capitalism to
“uncivilized” nations has been dangerous for Americans and the rest of
the world. The US has not been as exceptional as it would like to think. Its
blindness to its own violent histories and “cowboy diplomacy”15 bred a
militaristic nationalism and calamitous foreign policies that isolated it.16
The development of the US’s high self-regard stems from the early days
of the republic, with the nation’s exceptionalism systematically exagger-
ated and corrupted. Though there have been distinct elements in US his-
tories and political philosophy, these have been more heavily influenced by
European thought and experience than Americans would like to admit.
Much of the US’s success stemmed from historical and geographical luck
as opposed to ideological genius and inherent greatness.17
100 A. LEFKOVITZ
Hendrix and the Cultural Cold War

Hendrix’s participation in 1960s “swinging London” and countercul-
tural, sexually explicit acts at Monterey and Woodstock were in stark con-
trast to the US’s cultural Cold War, waged against the Soviet Union and
designed to spread high and middlebrow art, a US-centered form of jazz,
and US ideals and “values” to non-aligned populations throughout the
Global South. Diplomatically, racially, and sexually out of place, Hendrix’s
subversions of US government-approved, cultural Cold War codes and
conventions highlight his place as a racial, gender, sexual, and transna-
tional outcast, even as his membership in official rock mythologies centers
his role as a prominent symbol of US popular cultural “exceptionalism”
and transnational dominance.
The cultural Cold War Hendrix subverted was propagated during an
era of trauma for the US. The Korean War began, Communists completed
their takeover of China, the US sent its first military advisers to South
Vietnam, the Rosenbergs were arrested as spies for the Soviet Union,
which recently tested its first atomic bomb, Senator Joseph McCarthy and
the Hollywood blacklist made national headlines, consumer culture was a
way to delineate boundaries between East and West, and popular culture
was a force exporting US foreign policy during the “American century.”
As a broad range of expressions demonstrate the cultural Cold War’s var-
ied manifestations, the development of a US Cold War culture challenges
the existence of a monolithic culture during this period. This notes how
there was more to US culture than conformity, political conservatism,
consumerism, and middle-class values, as popular culture, economics,
gender relations, sexual anxieties, and civil rights shaped and distorted
multiple aspects of the monolithic US Cold War culture.
For a half century after the end of World War II, the seemingly perma-
nent Cold War provided the US with an organizing logic governing vari-
ous aspects of its culture. The Cold War can be re-evaluated as a cultural
struggle in addition to its economic, military, and political components.
Though the central transnational struggle in the decades following World
War II has been understood as a predominantly political and military
event, the Cold War shaped its times’ cultural productions, personalities,
and movements. US and transnational popular cultures defined and were
defined by Cold War attitudes. Cold War culture encompassed media
influences, social practices, and symbolic representations as they shaped
and were shaped by various transnational relations.
As the cultural Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West was
without precedent, an extraordinary cultural competition was enacted
across the hubs of Moscow, New York, London, Paris, and Berlin. The
cultural Cold War permeated such categories as race, gender, sexuality,
ethnicity, class, nation, the family, mobility, and cultural attitudes, prac-
tices, and “values” in film, popular and classical music, ballet, dance, paint-
ing, sculpture, theater, Broadway musicals, propaganda by exhibition,
travel literature, journalism, poetry, philanthropic organizations, such
magazines as Time, cartoons, consumer goods, games, toys, sports, televi-
sion, including news, documentaries, dramas, debate shows, and situation
comedies, and such issues as public opinion and popular culture’s produc-
tion and consumption.18
As the economic and political divide between capitalism and commu-
nism seemed to be as wide and definitive as any cultural rift, culture con-
tributed to the reinforcement and blurring of ideological borders between
East and West. Tensions, rivalries, and occasional cooperation occurred
between the two blocs, and aesthetic preferences and cultural phenomena,
such as interior design in East and West Germany, the Soviet stance on
genetics, and the role of popular music, including the State Department’s
“Jazz Ambassadors,” highlight the Cold War’s cultural dimensions.19
Artists became involved in the fierce competition through which the
US and Soviet Union sought to establish their transnational supremacy.
These include Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Spanish expatriate painter,
sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, one of the greatest and
most influential artists of the twentieth century, and the creator (with
Georges Braque) of Cubism, and Dmitry Shostakovich (1906–1975), the
Russian composer, renowned for his 15 symphonies, numerous chamber
works, and concerti, many of them written under the pressures of
government-imposed standards of Soviet art.20
Dissatisfied with traditional diplomatic and military interpretations, his-
torians investigated the crucial role that culture played in shaping the Cold
War conflict. Broad-based and unique cultural assumptions motivated US
policies from the end of World War II to the fall of the Berlin Wall, a bar-
rier that surrounded West Berlin and prevented access to it from East
Berlin and adjacent areas of East Germany from 1961 to 1989.21 The
cultural Cold War was supplemental to the struggle for power and influ-
ence, and it became involved in superpowers’ imperial ambitions, mili-
tary strategies, antagonistic ideologies, conflicting worldviews, and their
102 A. LEFKOVITZ
c orrelates in the cultures involved.22 In the two decades after World War
II, Germans on both sides of the Iron Curtain fought over US cultural
imports. Westerns,23 jeans, jazz, rock and roll, and stars like Elvis Presley
and Marlon Brando (1924–2004), the US film and stage actor known for
his visceral, brooding characterizations, the most celebrated of the method
actors, a performer whose slurred, mumbling delivery marked his rejec-
tion of classical dramatic training, and whose passionate performances
proved him one of the greatest actors of his generation, reached adoles-
cents in East and West Germany, who eagerly adopted the new styles. East
and West German authorities deployed racial and gender norms to contain
Americanized youth cultures in their territories and carry out the ideologi-
cal Cold War. Diverging responses to US culture in East and West Germany
linked to changes in transnational alliance systems, highlighting compara-
tive cultural histories of East and West Germany, Weimar and National
Socialism’s legacies, and Americanization and the Cold War.
Cultural propaganda played a central role in integrating Austrians and
other Europeans into the US sphere during the Cold War. Americanization
was the result of market forces, consumerism, and US systematic planning.
Intimate relations developed between the economic and political recon-
struction of a democratic Austria and the parallel process of US cultural
assimilation. Initially, US cultural programs were developed to impress
Europeans with the US’s high cultural achievements. However, popular
culture was more readily accepted among the young, the primary target
group of the propaganda campaign. US cultural hegemony became visible
in multiple quarters of Austrian culture, including the press, advertising,
comics, literature, education, radio, music, theater, and fashion, with the
prevalence of Coca-Cola and rock music two examples, as Hollywood
proved effective in spreading US cultural ideals.24
The Cold War’s centrality to US national identity was highlighted in
the question asked by John Updike (1932–2009), US writer of novels,
short stories, and poetry, known for his careful craftsmanship and realistic
and subtle representations of US, Protestant, small-town, and middle-
class life: “Without the Cold War, what’s the point of being an American?,”
asked in Updike’s novel Rabbit at Rest (1990). The Cold War influenced
various aspects of US culture, from 1950s McCarthyism, including its
effects on the US and European intelligentsia, to the 1950s and 1960s
Civil Rights Movement. As the Cold War produced and was sustained by
hyper-patriotism, intolerance, and suspicion, its pathologies pervaded
multiple aspects of US culture, including entertainment, churches, schools,
economics, and politics.25 In the culture of containment, culture and geo-

politics were interwoven to transform the Cold War order into an ethni-
cally diverse and economically interdependent world under the aegis of
US global hegemony.
Cultural Cold War histories extend to the Truman and Eisenhower
Administrations, when Washington policymakers aspired to destabilize the
Soviet and East European Communist Party regimes by implementing
programs of psychological warfare and gradual cultural infiltration. US
propaganda and cultural penetration of the Soviet empire in these years
illuminate US Cold War cultural diplomacy.26 Since its tentative begin-
nings in World War I, formal US cultural diplomacy notes the professional
experiences of the men and women representing US education, art, and
literature to the rest of the world. People, programs, ideas, and debates
shaping US cultural diplomacy highlight the past and future of cultural
diplomacy and official efforts to create a favorable transnational image of
the US.27
While 1950s European intellectuals reduced US culture to nothing
more than Westerns and the atomic bomb, US cultural diplomats tried to
show that the US did indeed have something to offer beyond military
might and commercial exploitation. Through literary magazines, traveling
art exhibits, touring musical shows, radio programs, book translations,
and conferences, they deployed revolutionary modernist aesthetics to
prove to leftists, whose Cold War loyalties they hoped to secure, that US
art and literature were aesthetically rich and culturally significant. By
repurposing modernism, US diplomats and cultural authorities turned the
avant-garde into the establishment. They remade a once-revolutionary
movement into a collection of artistic techniques and styles suitable for
middlebrow consumption.28
The CIA, State Department, and private cultural diplomats transformed
modernist art and literature into pro-Western propaganda during the
Cold War’s first decade. In histories of such figures and institutions as
William Faulkner, Stephen Spender, Irving Kristol, James Laughlin, and
Voice of America,29 the US government reconfigured modernism as a
transatlantic movement and joint endeavor between US and European
artists, with implications for the art that followed and US culture’s charac-
ter, as the nation presented its cultural avant-garde as evidence of
liberty.30
In 1955, the US Information Agency published a lavishly illustrated
booklet called My America. Seemingly assembled to document the basic
104 A. LEFKOVITZ
elements of a free and dynamic society, the booklet emphasized cultural

diversity, political freedom, social mobility, and made no mention of
McCarthyism and the Cold War. My America was one of hundreds of
pamphlets from this era written and distributed to forge a collective
defense of the “American way of life.” Noting US propaganda’s early Cold
War content, context, and reception, determined to protect democratic
capitalism31 and undermine communism, US information experts defined
the national interest in economic, geopolitical, and military terms.
Through radio shows, films, and publications, experts proliferated a cul-
tural narrative of freedom, progress, and abundance as a means of protect-
ing national security. As US propaganda was received at home and abroad,
criticism of it by Congress and successive presidential administrations con-
tributed to its alterations.32
In 1954, at the Cold War’s height, Republican president Dwight
D. Eisenhower inaugurated a program of cultural exchange, sending danc-
ers and other artists to transnational “hot spots.” This peacetime ploy was
a decisive success, meant to strengthen strained relations with Cold War
enemies. Among the artists chosen were José Limón, who led his com-
pany on the first government-sponsored tour of South America, Martha
Graham, whose famed ensemble crisscrossed Southeast Asia, Alvin Ailey,
Jr. (1931–1989), African-American dancer, choreographer, and director
of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater,33 whose company brought
audiences to their feet throughout the South Pacific, and George
Balanchine, whose New York City Ballet crowned its visits to Western
Europe and Japan with an epoch-making Soviet Union tour in 1962. The
success of Eisenhower’s cultural export program led to the creation of the
National Endowment for the Arts and the Kennedy Center in Washington.
The inner workings of “Eisenhower’s Program” note the economic, polit-
ical, and artistic interests shaping it, uneasy relationships between the US
government and the arts, US selection and funding processes, touring
companies’ receptions and difficulties, and the propagation of US cultural
diplomacy through dance.
While US accounts of “Cold War culture” ignore Soviet cultural activi-
ties, Soviet artistic standards and teaching levels were exceptionally high,
yet there was apprehension concerning freedom and innovation. Powerful
states reacted fearfully to foreign cultural expressions and could not always
distinguish cultural differences from hostile intentions in the struggle for
cultural supremacy.34 As Cold War ideas and events were shaped by US
culture, they were explained and promoted at home and around the world
and varied from one geographical context to another. With domestic

political culture impacting particular conflicts, the manner and means by
which the Cold War was waged varied according to decade and transna-
tional place.35
Cold War-era US transnational modernization efforts were a means to
remake the world in the US’s image. The emerging concept of moderniza-
tion combined development ideas from the Great Depression and such
ambitious New Deal programs as the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a
US government agency established in 1933 to control floods, improve
navigation, improve farmers’ living standards, and produce electrical
power along the Tennessee River and its tributaries. The Tennessee River
was subject to severe periodic flooding, and navigation along the river’s
middle course was interrupted by a series of shoals at Muscle Shoals,
Alabama. In 1933, the US Congress passed a bill establishing the TVA,
thus consolidating all the activities of the various government agencies in
the area and placing them under the control of a single one. A massive
program of building dams, hydroelectric generating stations, and flood-
control projects ensued. The fusion of a broad range of specific powers
with a sense of social responsibility to the region made the TVA significant
as a prototype of natural-resource planning. Its jurisdiction has generally
been limited to the drainage basin of the Tennessee River, which covers
parts of Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina,
Tennessee, and Virginia. The TVA became a public corporation, governed
by a board of three directors appointed by the president with the advice
and consent of the Senate. The TVA’s constitutionality was immediately
challenged upon the agency’s establishment, but it was upheld by the
Supreme Court in the case Ashwander v. Tennessee Valley Authority (1936)
and in later decisions. The TVA and other projects became symbols of US
liberalism’s ability to marshal the social sciences, state planning, civil soci-
ety, and technology to produce economic, political, and cultural changes.
For proponents, it became a weapon to check the influence of fascist and
communist ideologies.36
As modernization took on geopolitical importance while the US
grappled with these threats, after World War II, modernization remained
a means to contain the Soviet Union. US-led nation-building efforts in
transnational hot spots, enlisting non-governmental groups and interna-
tional organizations, were a basic part of US Cold War strategy. While a
close connection to the Vietnam War and other 1960s upheavals would
discredit modernization, the end of the Cold War further obscured
106 A. LEFKOVITZ
modernization’s mission, but many of its assumptions regained promi-

nence after September 11th, 2001 as the US moved to “contain” new
threats in its “War on Terror.”37
As part of the US’s ideological motivations and humanitarian efforts
abroad, liberal and neo-liberal ideas guided US foreign policy. Though the
liberal vision of modernization lost its appeal amidst the trauma of the
Vietnam War, it remains embedded in the US imagination and strategic
impetus of US development before, during, and after the Cold War. In US
attempts to employ development as an ideological weapon, the evolution
of twentieth-century US foreign policies and thinking about “develop-
ment” and “modernization” in the context of cultural and intellectual
trends note how modernization ideas furnished foundations for post-
World War II US development policy.38
Demands placed on young Americans as a result of the Cold War gave
rise to an increasingly age-segregated society. This separation allowed ado-
lescents and young adults to formulate identities distinct from previous
generations and was a significant factor in their widespread rejection of
materialistic US culture. The emergence of a distinctive post-war family
dynamic between parent, adolescent, and adult child can be read in the
work of such mid- twentieth-century US writers as Arthur Miller, William
Styron, J.D. Salinger, Tennessee Williams, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack
Kerouac, Flannery O’Connor, and Sylvia Plath. These writers’ work can
be situated in relation to the Cold War, as representations of adolescents
and young people reflected and contributed to an empowerment of US
youth culture.39
Interacting with long-term historical trends related to demographics,
technological change, and economic cycles, multiple elements influenced
US Cold War-era politics and culture, such as the threat of nuclear annihi-
lation, use of surrogate and covert warfare, intensification of anti-
communist ideology, and rise of a powerful military-industrial complex.
As the Cold War can be reassessed as a superpower conflict and part of
high diplomacy and cultural histories, cross-cultural comparisons can be
made of the Cold War’s cultural aspects across the East/West divide.40
Economic, political, and cultural contexts of Cold War-era World’s
Fairs and International Exhibitions highlight when the US and Soviet
Union, while laying claim to the same cultural values, used architecture
and design to represent their opposing ideologies at expos and exhibitions
with the aim of influencing transnational fairgoers. Such US architects and
designers as R. Buckminster Fuller, Charles and Ray Eames, George
Nelson, Peter Blake, Ivan Chermayeff, and Thomas Geismar designed the
US presence at major World Expositions, such as Expo ‘67 in Montreal
and Expo ‘70 in Osaka, Japan. Architects and designers played a signifi-
cant role in shaping the US’s image during the cultural Cold War.41
In post-World War II Europe and the Middle East, Hilton hotels
became “little Americas.” For US businessmen and tourists, a Hilton
hotel, with the comfortable familiarity of an English-speaking staff, restau-
rants serving cheeseburgers and milkshakes, and transatlantic telephone
lines, offered a respite from the disturbingly alien in a type of air-
conditioned modernity. For impoverished local populations, these same
features lent the Hilton a utopian aura. The Hilton was a space of luxury
and desire, prominently realizing the US’s powerful presence. Through
architectural means, the Hilton was written into urban topographies as a
US cultural symbol. Between 1953 and 1966, Hilton International built
16 luxury hotels abroad. Frequently, the Hilton was the first significant
modern structure in the host city and its finest hotel. The Hiltons intro-
duced a striking visual contrast to the traditional architectural forms of
such cities as Athens, Istanbul, Cairo, and Jerusalem, where their architec-
tural impact was amplified by the hotels’ unprecedented setting and scale.
Even in cities familiar with modern culture, Hiltons dominated the urban
landscape with their height, changing the look of the host city. These
hotels were constructed for profit and political impact to show countries
most exposed to communism the “free world’s” fruits. One of the Cold
War’s first transnational businesses, Hiltons played a political-cultural role
in the anti-communist struggle.42
Cultural Cold War exchanges note the value of travel and face-to-face
meetings between adversaries as a method of reducing tensions and pro-
moting peace. As the cost-benefit analysis favors exchanges, as opposed to
war and an arms race, as a tool to assist in the preservation of peace and
security, the cultural Cold War highlights the value of openness even dur-
ing the era’s most tense periods. As US leaders from a broad political
spectrum took the risk of allowing access to the US by students and lead-
ers from the nation’s most feared competitor, it produced an unimagined
payoff.43 Some 50,000 Soviets visited the US under various exchange
programs between 1958 and 1988. They came as scholars, students,
scientists, engineers, writers, journalists, government and party officials,
musicians, dancers, athletes, and KGB officers. These exchange programs,
which brought an even larger number of Americans to the Soviet Union,
raised the Iron Curtain and fostered changes preparing the way for
108 A. LEFKOVITZ
Mikhail Gorbachev (1931–), general secretary of the Communist Party

of the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991 and president of the Soviet
Union from 1990–1991. Gorbachev’s efforts to democratize his coun-
try’s political system and decentralize its economy led to the downfall of
communism and breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. In part because
he ended the Soviet Union’s post-war domination of Eastern Europe,
Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1990. Perestroika
was a mid-1980s program restructuring Soviet economic and political
policy, while the late-1980s glasnost policy of open discussion of political
and social issues began the Soviet Union’s democratization and the end
of the Cold War.44
The USSR surged into the modern media age after World War II,
building cultural infrastructures and audiences that were among the
world’s largest. Soviet audiences were enthusiastic radio listeners, televi-
sion watchers, and filmgoers. The bulk of what they were consuming was
not the dissident culture making headlines in the West, but orthodox,
made-in-the-USSR content. This was a major achievement for a regime
that had long touted easy, everyday access to a socialist cultural experience
as a birthright. Soviet successes brought unintended consequences. Such
factors as the rise of the single-family household, a more sophisticated
consumer culture, foreign media’s long reach and seductive influence, and
professional pride and raw ambition in the media industries highlight a
Soviet media empire transformed from within during the post-World War
II era. The result was a dynamic and volatile Soviet culture, with its center
of gravity shifting from the lecture hall to the living room, and a new
brand of cultural experience that was personal, immediate, and eclectic in
a new Soviet culture similar to that of its self-defined enemy, the mass
culture of the West.
By the 1970s, the Soviet media empire, stretching beyond its founders’
wildest dreams, was undermining the promise of a unique Soviet culture
and losing the cultural Cold War. Soviet successes and failures in the post-
World War II media age include the development and expansion of 1950s,
1960s, and 1970s Soviet film, television, and radio industries, when the
Soviet Union cultivated a mass visual culture intended to rival Western
dominance. In these transformative decades, forms of public experience
became private, as previously public and collective forms of Soviet life
became privatized. Soviets’ success at creating an indigenous popular
culture became a major part of the USSR’s eventual downfall, since the
media in which the culture was expressed were inherently skewed toward
a non-Soviet worldview. As tensions constrained post-Stalinist mass-media

production, Soviets managed to create formidable media institutions,
seeking to educate and entertain.45
During the Cold War, freedom of expression was vaunted as liberal
democracy’s most cherished possession. Such freedom was put in the ser-
vice of a hidden agenda, with the efforts of a secret campaign in which
intellectual freedom’s most vocal exponents in the West were working for
or subsidized by the CIA. The agency’s activities between 1947 and 1967,
and its covert program of cultural intervention in the US and Western
Europe, included a campaign to deploy Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin,
Leonard Bernstein, Robert Lowell, George Orwell, and Jackson Pollock
as weapons in the cultural Cold War. Histories of covert cultural efforts to
win hearts and minds highlight the interlocking nature of US governmen-
tal, corporate, and cultural sectors.46
While, in the Soviet world, writers and artists were expected to produce
works glorifying militancy, struggle, and relentless optimism, in the West,
freedom of expression was vaunted as liberal democracy’s most cherished
possession.47 In tandem with Cold War-era Hollywood and the Soviet
Union’s cinematic campaign against the West, British cinema played a role
in Cold War propaganda in its attempt to create a consensus among British
audiences regarding Cold War issues. Forgotten films include High Treason
(1951), focusing on British McCarthyism, The Man Between (1953), set
in a divided Berlin, and Little Red Monkey (1955). As Cold War themes
were refracted through British and Hollywood films released in Britain,
the British public received this “war propaganda” and, in Cold War-era
British cinema, most filmmakers closely followed prevailing political norms
and taboos as the largely unchallenged constraints under which British
studios operated were formed in the shadow of the “special relationship”
with the US.48
Additionally, in gospel and blues music of the post-World War II period
(1945–1960), over 300 songs, many of them rare recordings, from such
artists as B.B. King, singer, pianist, and R&B star Fats Domino, and elec-
tric blues singer-guitarist John Lee Hooker, denote themes central to the
Cold War-era,49 including economic issues, civil rights, presidential elec-
tions, the space race, atomic bomb, and the Korean War, a conflict between
the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) and the
Republic of Korea (South Korea) in which at least 2.5 million people lost
their lives.
110 A. LEFKOVITZ
In the wake of the US “losing” China, when the Chinese Communist

Party and its allies founded the People’s Republic of China in 1949,
Western foreigners attempted to change the country. This was the goal of
foreign missionaries, soldiers, doctors, teachers, engineers, and revolu-
tionaries for more than 300 years. Though eagerly accepting Western
technical advice, the Chinese clung staunchly to their religious and cul-
tural traditions. As a new era of relations between China and the US con-
tinues into the twenty-first century, these cautionary histories apply to
businessmen, diplomats, students, and other foreigners who naively
believe they can transform this diverse and complex nation.50
After World War II, US writers and artists produced a stream of popular
narratives about Americans living, working, and traveling in Asia and the
Pacific. As the US, competing with the Soviet Union for transnational
hegemony, extended its power into Asia, the proliferation of Orientalist
culture and expansion of US authority were linked. The post-World War
II period became one of transnational economic and political integration,
together with the process of Americanization. Cultural forms and expres-
sions include Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musicals South Pacific (1949)
and The King and I (1951), multiple examples of cinematic Orientalism,
from Anna and the King of Siam (1946) to Road to Bali (1952), Pearl of
the South Pacific (1955), The Road to Hong Kong (1962), and You Only
Live Twice (1967),51 James Michener (1907?–1997), the US novelist and
short-story writer who represented foreign environments for US readers
through his travel essays and novel Hawaii (1959), and Eisenhower’s
People-to-People Program. US policy makers, middlebrow artists, writers,
and intellectuals created a culture of transnational integration representing
the growth of US power in Asia and forging bonds between Americans
and those in the “Orient.” This enlarges the notion of Orientalism, or a
system of representations framed by economic, political, and cultural
forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, consciousness, and
empire, by highlighting ways Cold War-era culture brought about further
transnational integration, as multiple visions of Asia manifested in US pop-
ular culture.52
Cultural Cold War-era histories and US foreign policies can also be
examined through the lens of gender and sexuality.53 This especially
pertains to questions about the Vietnam War, as US policymakers, men
priding themselves on “hardheaded pragmatism” and shunning “fuzzy
idealism” committed the nation to a ruinous, costly, and protracted war in
Vietnam. In addition to anti-communist ideology and national interest
calculations in determining US Cold War foreign policy were the common

backgrounds and shared values of its propagators, especially their deep-
seated sense of white male privilege and upper-class masculinity.
Institutions shaping men in the US foreign-policy establishment, such
as all-male prep schools, Ivy League universities, collegiate secret societies,
and exclusive men’s clubs, instilled stoic ideals of competition, duty, and
loyalty. Service in elite World War II military units reinforced this pattern
of socialization, creating an “imperial brotherhood” of US foreign policy-
makers, imbued with a common vision of US hegemony.54 The commit-
ment to tough-minded masculinity shared by these men encouraged
policies that were aggressively interventionist abroad and intolerant of dis-
sent at home.
A gendered analysis of the McCarthy era notes ways the purge of sus-
pected homosexuals in the State Department paralleled the repression of
the political left and reflected a contest for power between the foreign-
policy elite and provincial congressional conservatives. Issues of manliness
similarly influenced the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. While such
programs as the Peace Corps were rooted in ideals of masculine heroism,
decisions concerning the Vietnam War were imbued with ideals of mascu-
line strength and power. Elite constructions of male identities shaped US
foreign policies during the Cold War’s early decades, with hetero-
normative gender codes created by establishment white men central to the
Vietnam War’s implementation.
Officials who committed the US to the Vietnam War did so to demon-
strate their manliness, toughness, and to avoid any stigma of appeasement
in the face of “pink” (associated with queer) communist aggression. As
1960s US foreign policymakers were preoccupied with demonstrating their
manliness, the basis for participation in the Cold War-era US government
rested on a devotion to masculinity and heterosexual orthodoxy. The
McCarthy-era “Red Scare” connected with the “Lavender Scare,”55 a
1950s witch hunt and mass firing of homosexuals from the US govern-
ment, paralleling McCarthy’s anti-communist campaign and fear of com-
munism that permeated US politics and culture in the late 1940s and
1950s, during the opening phases of the Cold War with the Soviet Union.
Occurring after World War II (1939–1945) and popularly known as
“McCarthyism” after its most famous supporter, Republican Senator
Joseph McCarthy (1908–1957), who dominated US politics in the early
1950s through his sensational but unproven charges of communist subver-
sion in high government circles, McCarthyism coincided with interlocking
112 A. LEFKOVITZ
early Cold War factors. These included an increasing popular fear of com-
munist espionage and a Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe, the confessions
of spying for the Soviet Union made by several high-ranking US govern-
ment officials, the Korean War, the Chinese Civil War (1945–1949), and
the Berlin Blockade and Airlift (1948–1949), a transnational crisis that
arose from an attempt by the Soviet Union to force Western Allied powers
(the US, UK, and France) to abandon their post-World War II jurisdictions
in West Berlin.56
Ensuring manliness at home and abroad, elite men’s participation in
the Vietnam War represented the rise of an imperial brotherhood’s obses-
sion with translating personal toughness into foreign policy.
Interconnections between gender ideology, especially masculinity and
homophobia, and Cold War-era US foreign policy illuminate the Vietnam
War’s gendered roots. Exposed masculinity came to define Democratic
and Republican presidential candidacies with regards to containment, law
and order, and maintaining US supremacy, as anxieties concerning gender
lay at the core of Cold War-era thinking. With masculinity discourses shap-
ing early Cold War ideology, concerns about gender, sexuality, and man-
hood transformed US political language, recasting US liberalism into a
pragmatic, fighting faith.57
While a cult of toughness shaped early Cold War politics, the preoccu-
pation with masculinity and excessive emphases placed on masculine viril-
ity in political life reflected anxieties concerning manhood, sexuality, and
Cold War ideological imperatives. Major figures of the era exemplifying
these gender roles include historian and educator Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.,
Adlai Stevenson, the diplomat who helped found the UN and was an
unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidate in 1952 and 1956, FBI
Director J. Edgar Hoover, the novelist and journalist Norman Mailer, best
known for using “New Journalism,” combining literature’s imaginative
subjectivity with journalism’s more objective qualities, and whose fiction
and nonfiction provided a radical critique of the totalitarianism he believed
inherent in US culture’s centralized power structure, David Riesman,
sociologist and author, most noted for The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the
Changing American Character (1950), with “the lonely crowd” becom-
ing a catchphrase denoting an urban culture in which the individual feels
alienated, William Whyte, urbanologist and author of The Organization
Man (1956), illuminating the conformity defining large 1950s US firms,
and Richard Nixon, 37th US President (1969–1974), who, faced with
almost certain impeachment for his role in the Watergate scandal, became
the first US president to resign from office. Lesser-known experts’ and

cultural commentators’ anxieties about US masculinity’s decline shaped
the era’s political and cultural dynamics and inspired a reinvention of the
liberal as a cold warrior in the figure of John F. Kennedy.58
In addition to its production and consumption during a cultural Cold
War era, Hendrix’s racialized rock was heard as the US continued to grap-
ple with its vicious legacy of white supremacy, represented in the 1950s
and 1960s Civil Rights Movement and the seminal event in 1957 of the
“Little Rock Nine.” This group, consisting of Melba Pattillo, Ernest
Green, Elizabeth Eckford, Minnijean Brown, Terrence Roberts, Carlotta
Walls, Jefferson Thomas, Gloria Ray, and Thelma Mothershed became the
center of the struggle to desegregate US public schools, especially in the
South.
Following the US Supreme Court’s decision on May 17th, 1954, in its
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, declaring racial segrega-
tion in public schools unconstitutional and mandating their desegrega-
tion, controversy and violence erupted, particularly in the South. The
events that followed the Little Rock Nine’s enrollment in Little Rock
Central High School provoked a heated national debate about racial seg-
regation and civil rights. Television and newspaper reporters devoted
extensive coverage to the Little Rock Nine, as the African-American stu-
dents were called. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Orval Faubus
(1910–1994), who, as governor of Arkansas (1954–1967), fought against
the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School, and Little Rock
Mayor Woodrow Mann discussed the situation over the course of 18 days
while the nine students stayed home. The students returned to the high
school on September 23rd, entering through a side door to avoid protest-
ers. When they were discovered, white protesters became violent, attack-
ing African-American bystanders and Northern newspaper reporters. The
students were sent home and returned the next day, protected by US sol-
diers. Despite Eisenhower’s publicly stated reluctance to use federal troops
to enforce desegregation, he recognized the potential for violence and
state insubordination, sent the elite 101st Airborne Division, called the
“Screaming Eagles,” to Little Rock, and placed the Arkansas National
Guard under federal command, the first time in 81 years a president dis-
patched troops to the South to protect African-Americans’ constitutional
rights.59
The Little Rock Nine continued to face physical and verbal attacks
from white students throughout their studies at Central High. One of the
114 A. LEFKOVITZ
students, Minnijean Brown, fought back and was expelled. The remain-
ing eight students attended the school for the rest of the academic year.
At the end of the year, in 1958, senior Ernest Green became the first
African-American to graduate from Little Rock Central High School. In
1958, Faubus was re-elected and closed all of Little Rock’s schools rather
than permit desegregation. Many Southern school districts followed,
closing schools, and implementing “school-choice” programs subsidizing
white students’ attendance at private segregated academies. Little Rock
Central High School did not reopen with a desegregated student body
until 1960, while efforts to integrate schools and other public areas in the
US continued through the 1960s. At an event honoring Daisy Bates as
1990’s Distinguished Citizen, future president and then Arkansas
Governor Bill Clinton called her “the most distinguished Arkansas citizen
of all time.” However, her account of the Little Rock School crisis, The
Long Shadow of Little Rock (1986), could not be found on most book-
store shelves and was banned throughout the South.
While illuminating mid-twentieth-century US racial politics in relation
to changes in youth culture, race, class, and nation, the Little Rock Nine
also highlight roles women played in the crisis, especially the Mothers’
League of Central High School and Women’s Emergency Committee to
Open Our Schools. White groups, including middle-class women and the
working class, shaped US race and class relations, as white women’s politi-
cal mobilizations, resentments, sexual fears, and religious affiliations over-
lapped. As the Little Rock business elite retained power in the face of
opposition, business leaders’ and moderates’ moral failures manifested in
their pursuit of the appearance of federal compliance rather than actual
racial justice, leaving behind a legacy of white flight, poor urban schools,
and institutionalized educational racism.60
Noting the racially based elements of conflict surrounding educational
integration, progress and backtracking, and Southern moderates’ ambiva-
lence, the Little Rock desegregation crisis was one of the Civil Rights
Movement’s pivotal chapters and a defining moment in mid- twentieth-
century US racial histories. Little Rock did not overcome its legacy of
strife. The two-year crisis left behind confusion and misunderstanding.
Racial and class-based mistrust lingered in Little Rock, and national and
transnational perceptions of Arkansas are still tied to the decades-old
images of hatred and violence marking the crisis, featuring constitutional,
historical, and personal aspects. As a famous September 1957 image from
the crisis, of Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan Massery, encapsulated
the crisis’s racialized and visual-cultural dimensions, with one trying to go

to school (Eckford) and the other (Massery) not wanting her there, the
Arkansas Gazette led the opposition to Faubus and won a Pulitzer Prize
for its coverage. While the federal government gradually came to accept its
responsibilities in protecting African-Americans’ constitutional rights, the
Little Rock crisis had national implications and influenced generations
decades later.61
With Eisenhower facing a serious threat to his presidency in the Little
Rock crisis, contrary to popular wisdom, according to some, this war hero
turned Republican president presided over major civil-rights advances,
paving the way for better-known 1960s breakthroughs. Though he
expressed distaste for racial segregation, Eisenhower believed integration
would take time.62 An activist, hands-on, and involved president, using a
“hidden-hand” leadership style to direct policy development and crisis
management, Eisenhower has been represented as aloof, if not hostile, to
African-Americans’ realities in the 1950s. It has been assumed that
Eisenhower opposed the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of
Education ruling, regretted appointing Earl Warren (1891–1974), the
14th US Supreme Court Chief Justice (1953–1969), who presided over
the Supreme Court during a period of sweeping changes in US constitu-
tional law, especially in the areas of race relations, criminal procedure, and
legislative apportionment,63 as the Court’s chief justice because of his role
in molding Brown, was a spectator in Congress’s passage of the 1957 and
1960 Civil Rights Acts (the 1957 Civil Rights Act was the first such law
passed since 1875), and so mishandled the Little Rock crisis that he was
forced to dispatch troops to rescue a failed policy.
However, Eisenhower worked behind the scenes, before Brown, to
desegregate Washington, DC and the armed forces.64 With his close col-
laborator Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Jr., Eisenhower sifted
through candidates for federal judgeships and appointed five pro-civil
rights Supreme Court justices and progressive judges to lower courts.
Eisenhower crafted civil-rights legislation, built a congressional coalition
that passed the 1957 Civil Rights Act, and maneuvered to avoid a show-
down with Faubus over desegregation of Little Rock’s Central High. A
product of his time and its backward racial attitudes, to a certain degree
Eisenhower was more progressive on civil rights in the 1950s than his
predecessor, Harry Truman, and successor, John F. Kennedy, a president
who continues to be lionized despite scholars characterizing him as a
“bystander” with regards to racial justice.65
116 A. LEFKOVITZ
More a man of deeds than words, preferring quiet action over grand-
standing, Eisenhower’s cautious, restrained public rhetoric, especially his
legalistic response to Brown, gave the impression that he was not commit-
ted to civil rights. In struggles over his histories, some concluded that
Eisenhower’s actions laid the legal and political groundwork for 1960s
civil-rights breakthroughs, aiming to dispel mythologies that Eisenhower
was personally and politically opposed to civil-rights legislation enactment
and enforcement. Eisenhower’s efforts to eliminate discrimination within
areas of federal jurisdiction, support of Earl Warren, and use of the mili-
tary to enforce the Brown v. Board of Education decision counter skepti-
cism about his motives, as it was his embrace of a traditional interpretation
of the separation of powers that led to his silences. His gradualist beliefs,
misconceptions about African-Americans, common to white politicians of
his era, and calls for obedience to the law, while undermining that demand
by asserting how little law could accomplish, played a role in weakening
his civil-rights reputation. Despite this, Eisenhower, depicted as a misun-
derstood yet effective politician, has been perceived by some as one of the
unsung heroes in the quest for civil rights due to his quiet leadership and
appointment of Earl Warren and federal judges in the South.66
Eisenhower’s civil-rights histories highlight ways each president since
Franklin Roosevelt confronted civil-rights issues during his tenure. Facing
intense demands to speak out, presidents have been key focal points in the
struggle for racial justice, influencing public attitudes and policies, as pat-
terns of presidential discourses on race note their promise and limitations.
Presidents’ communicative and symbolic involvement in civil-rights mat-
ters can be read in crucial speeches. Significant presidential speeches
include Truman’s June 29th, 1947 NAACP address, Eisenhower’s
September 24th, 1957 national address following the Little Rock crisis,
Kennedy’s June 11th, 1963 speech labeling civil rights a moral issue, and
Lyndon Johnson’s March 15th, 1965 voting rights message. These
emphasize the role of rhetoric in leadership, policy making, and meanings
and interpretations influencing US culture.67
Notes
1. Sheila Whiteley, “Progressive Rock and Psychedelic Coding in the Work of
Jimi Hendrix,” Popular Music 9.1 (Jan., 1990): 37–60.
2. Pete Fornatale, Back to the Garden: The Story of Woodstock (London: Simon
& Schuster, 2010); Ronald Helfrich, “‘What Can a Hippie Contribute to
Our Community?’ Culture Wars, Moral Panics, and the Woodstock

Festival,” New York History 91.3 (Summer 2010): 221–244; Michael Lang
and Holly George-Warren, The Road to Woodstock (New York: Ecco,
2009).
3. Rick Halpern, Jonathan Morris, and Commonwealth Fund Conference
(1995: University College London), American Exceptionalism?: US
Working-Class Formation in an International Context (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1997).
4. Kim Voss, The Making of American Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor
and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1993).
5. Marcela Cristi, From Civil to Political Religion: The Intersection of Culture,
Religion and Politics (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press,
2001); Raymond J. Haberski, God and War: American Civil Religion Since
1945 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012); Carole Lynn
Stewart, Strange Jeremiahs: Civil Religion and the Literary Imaginations of
Jonathan Edwards, Herman Melville, and W.E.B. Du Bois (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 2010); Ronald L. Weed and John von
Heyking, Civil Religion in Political Thought: Its Perennial Questions and
Enduring Relevance in North America (Washington, DC: Catholic
University of America Press, 2010).
6. April Carter, The Political Theory of Global Citizenship (New York:
Routledge, 2001); Nigel Dower and John Williams, Global Citizenship: A
Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2002); Hans Schattle, The
Practices of Global Citizenship (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Pub.,
2008); Tony Shallcross and John Robinson, Global Citizenship and
Environmental Justice (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2006); Olivier
Urbain, Daisaku Ikeda’s Philosophy of Peace: Dialogue, Transformation and
Global Citizenship (London; New York: I.B. Tauris in Association with the
Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research; New York: Distributed
in the United States and Canada Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
7. James S. Robbins, Native Americans: Patriotism, Exceptionalism, and the
New American Identity (New York: Encounter Books, 2013); John
D. Wilsey, American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion: Reassessing the
History of an Idea (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, an Imprint of
InterVarsity Press, 2015).
8. Justin B. Litke, Twilight of the Republic: Empire and Exceptionalism in the
American Political Tradition (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky,
2013).
9. Stephen Brooks, American Exceptionalism in the Age of Obama (New
York: Routledge, 2013).
118 A. LEFKOVITZ
10. Utz Lars McKnight and Ebooks Corporation, Race and the Politics of the
Exception: Equality, Sovereignty, and American Democracy (New York:
Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013).
11. Hilde Restad, American Exceptionalism: An Idea That Made a Nation and
Remade the World (Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge,
2014).
12. Jason A. Edwards and David Weiss, The Rhetoric of American Exceptionalism:
Critical Essays (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2011); Deborah
L. Madsen, American Exceptionalism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1998).
13. Irwin Abrams and Gungwu Wang, The Iraq War and Its Consequences:
Thoughts of Nobel Peace Laureates and Eminent Scholars (New Jersey:
World Scientific, 2003); Al Carroll, Medicine Bags and Dog Tags: American
Indian Veterans from Colonial Times to the Second Iraq War (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2008); Thomas Cushman, A Matter of
Principle; Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2005); John Davis, Presidential Policies and the Road to
the Second Iraq War: From Forty One to Forty Three (Aldershot, England;
Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006); Noah Feldman, What We Owe Iraq: War
and the Ethics of Nation Building (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
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Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (New York: Crown Publishers,
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History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
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the Iraq War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009); Chad
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14. Colin J. Bennett, The Privacy Advocates: Resisting the Spread of Surveillance
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); Stephen Chan, Out of Evil: New
International Politics and Old Doctrines of War (New York: I.B. Tauris,
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the Axis of Evil: The Truth About North Korea, Iran, and Syria (New York:
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(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Liz Fekete, A Suitable Enemy:
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15. Stanley Corkin, “Cowboys and Free Markets: Post-World War II Westerns
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17. Godfrey Hodgson, The Myth of American Exceptionalism (New Haven:
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19. Peter Romijn, Giles Scott-Smith, and Joes Segal, Divided Dreamworlds?:
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120 A. LEFKOVITZ
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122 A. LEFKOVITZ
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30. Greg Barnhisel and Lisa Force, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and
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Arthur C. Brooks, Wealth & Justice: The Morality of Democratic Capitalism
(Washington, DC: AEI Press; Summit, PA: Distributed by the National
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32. Laura A. Belmonte, Selling the American Way: U.S. Propaganda and the
Cold War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
33. Alvin Ailey and A. Peter Bailey, Revelations: The Autobiography of Alvin
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Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance (Madison,
WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002); Thomas DeFrantz, Dancing
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York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Thomas DeFrantz, “Composite
Bodies of Dance: The Repertory of the Alvin Ailey American Dance
Theater,” Theatre Journal 57.4, Black Performance (Dec., 2005): 659–
678; Brenda Dixon, “Black Dance and Dancers and the White Public: A
Prolegomenon to Problems of Definition,” Black American Literature
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Life in Dance (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996); Julia L. Foulkes,
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34. David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy
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(Middletown, CT; Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998).
35. Christian G. Appy, Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United
States Imperialism, 1945–1966 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
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36. Ronald Reed Boyce, “Geographers and the Tennessee Valley Authority,”
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37. Akbar S. Ahmed, The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror
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38. David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the
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124 A. LEFKOVITZ
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41. Jack Masey and Conway Lloyd Morgan, Cold War Confrontations: US
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42. Annabel Jane Wharton, Building the Cold War: Hilton International Hotels
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43. Yale Richmond, Cultural Exchange & the Cold War: Raising the Iron
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44. Michael Brashinsky and Andrew Horton, Russian Critics on the Cinema of
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(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Joseph Gibbs,
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50. Jonathan D. Spence, To Change China: Western Advisers in China, 1620–
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Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian
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52. Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination,
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55. Douglas M. Charles, The FBI’s Obscene File: J. Edgar Hoover and the
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65. Nick Bryant, The Bystander: John F. Kennedy and the Struggle for Black
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67. Garth E. Pauley, The Modern Presidency & Civil Rights: Rhetoric on Race
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CHAPTER 5
Conclusion
Abstract The conclusion reconnects Hendrix to the popular musical,

visual cultural, and transnational politics of race, gender, sexuality, class,
and nation. It notes ways Hendrix has been one of the most influential
popular musical pioneers of the last half-century. The conclusion high-
lights ways Hendrix is remembered for his racialized, “freakish” spectacles,
even as he embodied and performed an assertive and fearless stance against
white supremacy and empire. The conclusion notes Hendrix’s unique
ability to adeptly transverse racial, gender, sexual, class, and national bor-
ders within and beyond the Black Atlantic. It asserts that Hendrix’s racial,
gender, sexual, class, national, visual cultural, and popular musical border
crossings challenge US popular musical exceptionalism while highlighting
black popular music’s political, aesthetic, and transnational roots.
Keywords Black Popular Music • Empire • White Supremacy • Rock

Music
Illuminating black popular music’s profound contributions to transna-

tional popular culture, Jimi Hendrix was one of the most influential musi-
cal pioneers of the second half of the twentieth century. A seminal influence

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77013-0_5
142 A. LEFKOVITZ
on multiple artists, Hendrix’s central role in transnational popular cultural

histories highlights ways he was a principled artist, adamantly refusing to
conform to a particular conformist vision. An inimitable showman,
Hendrix is remembered for his racialized, “freakish” spectacles, even as he
performed an assertive and fearless stance against US empire and white
supremacy. Confirming hetero-normative rock expectations, while the US
was torn apart by mass uprisings, violence, poverty, decay, and foreign
interventions, Hendrix’s unique ability to adeptly transverse racial, gen-
der, sexual, class, national, colonial, popular musical, and visual cultural
borders, within and beyond the Black Atlantic, privileges him in crucial
moments in mid-twentieth-century transnational cultural histories and
popular music and visual culture’s relationships.
Hendrix was one among many African-American popular musicians
struggling against US and transnational white supremacy and prescriptive
definitions of racial authenticity, propagated by black popular music’s
white and black supporters. Making verbal sense of his accomplishments,
Hendrix demonstrated self-awareness as he engaged in discourses about
his vocation as a creator, thinker, writer, and politically conscious artist.
Leaving behind his own account of himself in his many interviews, lyrics,
writings, poems, diaries, and stage raps, Hendrix illuminates his dreams,
the stories behind his songs and now-legendary performances, and surreal
highs and lows of touring and stardom.
A key popular musical figure in mid-twentieth-century black-
transnational political-cultural histories, Hendrix helped make black pop-
ular music the soundtrack of US and international experiences as he
advanced the music as one of the preeminent shapers of transnational
popular culture. In histories of genres riven by upheaval, Hendrix’s
political-cultural and transnational border crossings challenge the limita-
tions of US popular musical exceptionalism while highlighting black pop-
ular music’s political, aesthetic, and transnational roots. One of the greatest
rockers the world has ever known, Hendrix was a perfectionist, a flamboy-
ant, brilliant composer whose imaginative sound effects were limited only
by equipment. An African-American artist under pressure from radical
black groups because his audience was predominantly white, Hendrix was
a dedicated guitarist overwhelmed by his lifestyle. His drug abuse and
early death from a probable barbiturate overdose overshadow his formi-
dable popular musical legacy.
Hendrix’s struggles between acquiescing to the dominant culture versus
acting out a type of racial, gender, sexual, and popular musical subversion
CONCLUSION 143
in his personal life and professional career demonstrate ways he disturbs

and confirms definitions of black popular music as exclusively American, as
Hendrix took black popular music abroad and remains a central figure in
black-transnational popular cultural histories in the US, Europe, Africa,
and beyond. In his performances of black popular music’s transnational
dimensions, Hendrix’s racial and hetero-normative representations can be
understood in a larger context of “post-racial” narratives and myths of
hyper-visual black men, seen as threats, role models, and both superhu-
man and subhuman icons. As his exoticized racial image connects to mul-
tiple black-transnational stereotypes, from the “Brute” to the “Tom,”
“Coon,” “Golliwog,” and “Nat,” Hendrix links to additional non-white
performers’ representational struggles, from Sammy Davis, Jr. to twenty-
first-century rappers.
A countercultural Cold War actor, enacting his political-cultural sub-
versions while the US superpower was using additional cultural forms to
wage a supplementary form of engagement against the Soviet Union,
Hendrix has been stigmatized by tragic, mysterious myths, also associated
with such black-transnational musical legends as Billie Holiday. Centering
black popular music at the core of US culture, legitimating and denying
US popular musical exceptionalism, and reintroducing black popular
music to its transnational roots, Hendrix negotiated accommodationist,
assimilationist, white, black, and “partly colored” racial codes, conven-
tions, and hierarchies. An emblem of racial progress and regression, in his
protracted legend and life as one of the twentieth century’s most innova-
tive musicians are the dramatic ups and downs of one of transnational
popular music’s foremost rock guitarists. Representing political-cultural
histories of a pivotal period in the US and raised in poverty in the Jim
Crow era, Hendrix was a performer blending his music and its place in the
world as a courageous public figure in a time of national strife and adver-
sity. His tumultuous journey, immeasurable influence, complicated family
dynamics, professional and personal triumphs and struggles, strong will to
overcome and succeed, and twisted and amazing life help make sense of
his musical and extra-musical significance.
In his trajectory to become a Black Power and countercultural sym-
bol, and in his glorification and depoliticization, Hendrix, troubled, mis-
understood, and complicated, shaped US and transnational popular
cultures in innumerable ways. Twisted up in rock and broader US cul-
tural “self-made,” individualistic mythologies surrounding his apparent
overnight success, Hendrix’s transformations from his poor childhood in
144 A. LEFKOVITZ
Seattle, to wealth and transnational fame, to legendary showman and

musical innovator occurred in tandem with his transversing of the mid-
twentieth-century color line, melding African-American blues with its
rock incarnations.
Hendrix’s great legacy was twenty-first-century US popular culture,
while his rough-and-tumble life serves as a metaphor for US cultural ten-
sions between black and white and rich and poor.
Modest and intensely private, Hendrix was shrouded in intrigue from
the moment he first came into the public eye and the mystery has only
grown with time. A self-taught, hungry, itinerant bluesman, in a life lived
on the edge and passionately devoted to music and freedom, Hendrix’s
music remains potent and compelling, adding dimensions to his profound
legacy. Bringing the “deepest, blackest” aspects of his experience to mass,
worldwide, interracial, and intercultural audiences, elevating him to an
idol-like stature, Hendrix embodied sensuality and assimilated it into his
repertoire. In his recording success and transnational stardom, he was a
trailblazer in music, a rock great exporting black popular culture to trans-
national audiences.
Hendrix’s innovations as a singer, songwriter, and guitarist greatly con-
tributed to the development of rock and other contemporary styles.
Remembered as one of US popular music’s most dynamic, colorful, and
inspired performers, Hendrix’s achievements cannot be measured only in
terms of his musical contributions. During the height of his popularity,
Hendrix became a transnational political-cultural symbol, demonstrating
how crossover success could be achieved without disowning racial aesthet-
ics’ countercultural power. As such, Hendrix connects to black popular
musical traditions, from Robert Johnson to Chuck D, and such rebel,
global sojourners as Marvin Gaye and Bob Marley, while noting a central
irony in US popular music histories—that some of the music that has been
interpreted as black, authentic, and expressive was invented, performed,
and enjoyed by people who strongly believed in white supremacy.
Performing popular music, one of the US’s most revealing art forms, in
explicitly political ways, Hendrix was one example of the ways, from the
antebellum period to the twenty-first century, and classical music to hip
hop, black popular music histories denoted economic contexts, domestic
and transnational politics, and cultural impact. In the intersecting political
aesthetics of black popular music and visual culture, Hendrix realized that
music can be a storehouse for, and threat to, economic, political, and cultural
CONCLUSION 145
power, acquiring and losing value over time. Hendrix’s transnational

histories illuminate ways black popular music was part of broader migrations
across national and cultural borders, unseating language and textuality as
preeminent expressions of human consciousness, in a nation with multiple
cultural crossroads, where the question of race is woven into the national
fabric. As the study of music shifts beyond studies of the music itself and
toward music’s political and cultural consequences and global roots and
networks, Hendrix’s place in US and black-transnational popular cultural
histories becomes part of the construction of identities resisting economic,
political, cultural, and colonial domination.
Index
A “Around and Around”, 71, 72

Adorno, Theodor, 78 Ashwander v. Tennessee Valley
African-Americans, 3, 7, 11, 25–30, Authority, 105
34–41, 45–48, 69–75, 77, 81–84, Atkins, Chet, 13
94, 104, 113–116, 142, 144 Auerbach, Dan, 8
“After Hours”, 30 Austria, 102
Ailey, Alvin, Jr., 104 Authenticity, 11, 29, 38, 41,
“Ain’t That Peculiar”, 78 45, 46, 96, 144
Albums and popular music, 4–7, 10, racial, 11, 141, 142
13, 32, 71, 77–83 Avant-garde, 44, 103
See also specific entries “Axis”: Bold as Love, 6
Al Green, 76, 77, 80 Axton, Estelle, 74
“All Along the Watchtower”, 4
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater,
104 B
Americanization, 102, 110 “Back in the USA”, 72
“Angel”, 9, 68 Back to the Future, 47
Animals, The, 76 Bad Brains, 45
Anna and the King of Siam, 110 Badu, Erykah, 10
Antwone Fisher, 37 Bailey, James A., 32
Arbus, Diane, 31 Bailey, Philip, 68
Arendt, Hannah, 109 Baker, Houston A., Jr., 82
Are You Experienced?, 5, 6 Baker, Josephine, 94
Arkansas Gazette, 115 Bakshi, Ralph, 38
Armstrong, Louis, 13 Balanchine, George, 104

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77013-0
148 INDEX
Baldwin, James, 94 Blake, Peter, 107

Ballads, 2, 9, 14, 29, 43, 68, 75, Blaxploitation films, 34, 80, 85
76, 78, 81, 83, 84 Bloodsucking Freaks, 31
Band of Gypsies, 13 Blue Light in the Basement, 81
Band of Gypsys, 12, 13 Blues, 2–6, 8–10, 13, 26, 29, 30, 35,
Baraka, Amiri, 82 43, 45, 46, 70–73, 75, 76,
Barbershop, 37 93–95, 109, 144
Barnum, P.T., 31 Bluest Eye, The, 31
Basie, Count, 4, 70 “B-Movie”, 83
Bates, Daisy, 114 Bolshevik Revolution, see October
Batwa Pygmy, 31 Revolution
BBC’s Radio 1, 6 Bones, 40
B.B. King, 3, 13, 109 Booker T. & The M.G.’s, 75
Beach Boys, The, 71 Boone, Pat, 73
“Bear Woman, The”, 33 “Bottle, The”, 82
Beatles, The, 4–6, 48, 71, 73, 74 Bowen, Eli, 34
Beck, Jeff, 4 Brando, Marlon, 102
Beloved, 31 Braque, Georges, 101
Berlin, Isaiah, 109 Brooks, Arthur, 83
Berlin Blockade and Airlift, 112 Brooks, Richard, 83
Berlin Wall, 101 Brown, Charles, 71
Bernstein, Leonard, 109 Brown, James, 73–74
Berry, Chuck, 28, 45–47, 68, Brown, Minnijean, 113, 114
70–72, 93 Brownell, Herbert, Jr., 115
Berry, Halle, 37 “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man”, 72
“Between You Baby and Me”, 84 Browning, Tod, 31
“Big Question”, 81 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka,
Birth of a Nation, The, 34, 42 113, 115, 116
Black Arts Movement, 82 Buddy Holly, 71
Black Arts Repertory Theatre, 82 Bunker, Chang, 34
Black Atlantic, 94, 142 Bunker, Eng, 34
Black film, 38–40, 35, 42 Burke, Solomon, 3, 68, 75
Black Joy, 35 Burnett, Charles, 38
Black Keys, The, 8 Bush, George, 99
Black popular music, 4, 29, 48, 76, Butler, Jerry, 83
77, 80, 84, 85, 94, 95, “Bye Bye Johnny”, 72
141–145, 42–45
Black Power movement, 9, 11, 143
Black Rock Coalition (BRC), 45 C
Black transnationalism, 2, 9–12, Cafe Wha?, 4
25–48, 94 Cage, John, 44
countercultural music, 95–96, Capitalism, 33, 35, 36, 99,
142–143, 145 101, 104
global gender and sexualized Caribbean music, 71
histories, 67–85 Carroll, Lewis, 33
INDEX
149
Carter, Betty, 36 Corridos, 43

Carter, Jimmy, 83 Cosmopolitan Club (St. Louis), 72
“Castles Made of Sand”, 68 Counterculture, 2, 6, 7, 9–11, 13, 29,
“Catfish Blues”, 30 32, 42, 46, 94, 100, 143, 144
Chameleon Street, 38 Country Joe and the Fish, 96
“Change Is Gonna Come, A”, 76, 77 Covay, Don, 78
Chap. 2, 81 Crabbe, Buster, 12
Charles, Ray, 3, 75, 81, 85 Cream, 5, 6
“Check Out Your Mind”, 84 Creedence Clearwater Revival
Cheeks, Julius, 75 (CCR), 74, 96
Chermayeff, Ivan, 107 Crisis, The (magazine), 37
Chess, Leonard, 4 Crosby, Stills and Nash, 96
Chess, Phil, 4 “Crosstown Traffic”, 9
Chess recording studios, 3, 4 Crow, Jim, 143
China, 110 Cry Baby, 6
Chinese Civil War, 112 “Cry to Me”, 75
Christian, Charlie, 68–71 Cultural assimilation, 102
Chromaticism, 70 Cultural Cold War, 2, 94,
Chuck D, 144 100–116, 143
CIA, 103, 109 Cultural diplomacy, 103, 104
Cirque du Freak, 31 Cultural hegemony, 102
Civil Rights Act of 1957, 115 Cultural propaganda, 102
Civil Rights Act of 1960, 115 Curtis, King, 2, 3
Civil Rights Movement, 76, 84, 102, Czech Republic, 45
113, 114
Clapton, Eric, 4, 5, 26, 28
Clark, Annie, 8 D
Clarke, Kenny, 70 d’Indy, Vincent, 44
Claudine, 85 “Dancing in the Streets”, 78
Clinton, Bill, 114 Daniels, Lee, 35
Clinton, George, 10 Dash, Julie, 38
Coca-Cola, 102 Davis, Angela, 30
Cocker, Joe, 96 Davis, Miles, 7
Cocteau, Jean, 14 Davis, Sammy, Jr., 11, 143
“Cole, Nat King”, 28, 72, 79 Deep Cover, 38
Collins, Wilkie, 33 Delta blues, 48, 95
Colorblindness, 97 Dickens, Charles, 33
Coltrane, John, 6 Diddley, Bo, 46
“Come On”, 71 Dirty South, 10
Communism, 37, 73, 99–101, Django, 14
104–108, 111–112 Django Reinhardt (documentary), 14
Cooke, Linda, 3 Documentaries, 14, 36, 95
Cooke, Sam, 3, 46, 68, 76, 77, 85 Domino, Fats, 109
Coonskin, 38 Dominoes, The, 46
Corbin, Myrtle, 33 Don’t Knock the Rock, 73
150 INDEX
“(Don’t Worry) If There’s F

a Hell Below We’re All Falsetto (the voice’s upper register),
Going to Go”, 85 30, 68, 73, 83, 84
Douglass, Frederick, 26, 27 Fanaka, Jamaa, 38
Down Beat, 81 Faubus, Orval, 113–115
Dreja, Chris, 4 Faulkner, William, 103
Du Bois, W. E. B., 37, 42 Fender, Leo, 8
Duke, Bill, 38 Films, 14, 29, 31–32, 68, 72, 73, 110
Dunn, Katherine, 31 black, 38–40, 35, 42
Durham, Eddie, 69 blaxploitation, 85, 34
Dutchman, 82 Cold War issues in, 109
Dylan, Bob, 4, 6, 43, 46, cultural and racial politics in,
47, 71, 95 11, 12, 34–42
Hollywood, 32, 34, 35, 37, 38,
40–41, 102, 109
E See also specific entries
Eames, Charles, 106 Finland, 45
Eames, Ray, 106 “Fire”, 5, 68
Easy Rider, 29 “First Minute of a New Day, The”, 82
Eckford, Elizabeth, 113–115 First Take, 80
Eddie Kendricks, 68 “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,
Eight Legged Freaks, 31 The”, 81
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 104, 113, Fishbone, 45
115, 116 Flack, Roberta, 80, 81
Administration, 103 Flash Gordon, 12
People-to-People Program, 110 “Flower Power”, 9
“Eisenhower’s Program”, 104 Fogerty, John, 74
“Electric Church Music”, 9 Ford, Gerald, 83
Electric guitar, 2, 8–9, 11, 13, “For Your Precious Love”, 83
30, 48, 69, 70 “Foxy Lady”, 5, 68
Electric Ladyland, 7, 13 Franklin, Aretha, 46, 84, 85
Eliot, T.S., 80 Freak culture, 2, 7, 10, 12, 25–48,
Ellison, Ralph, 68, 72, 73
26, 27, 69 Freaks, 31
Enfreakment, 32 “Freddie’s Dead”, 85
England, 5, 45, 48, 98 Freedom of expression, 109
Victorian, 32 Free Jazz movement, 48
“Everybody Needs Somebody Fuller, R. Buckminster, 106
to Love”, 75 Funk music, 2, 5, 7, 10, 74, 83, 85
Expo ‘67 (Montreal), 107 “Future Shock”, 84
Expo ‘70 (Osaka, Japan), 107 Fuzz Face, 6
INDEX
151
G Guthrie, Arlo, 29
Garcia, Jerry, 13 Guy Mitchell Show, The, 72
Garvey, Marcus, 27, 28 Gypsy, 9, 12–14, 27, 29
Gaye, Marvin, 77–80, 144 “Gypsy Eyes”, 13
Gayle, Addison, Jr., 82 Gypsy Sun and Rainbows, 12–13
Geek Love, 31
Geismar, Thomas, 107
Gerde’s Folk City, 4 H
Gerima, Haile, 38 Hammerstein, Oscar, 110
“Get Out of the Ghetto Hammond, John, 4, 69
Blues, The”, 82 “Hardest-Working Man in Show
G-Funk, 10 Business, The”, 74
“Ghetto, The”, 80 Hard rock, 6, 8, 9, 10
Gillespie, Dizzy, 70 Hardy, Ebby, 72
Girl Can’t Help It, The, 73 Harris, R.H., 76
Glissandos, 73 Harris, Wendell B., Jr., 38
Go, Johnny, Go!, 72 Hathaway, Donny, 68, 80–81
“Godfather of Funk, The”, 74 “Havana Moon”, 71
“Godfather of Soul, The”, 74 Havens, Richie, 96
Goldberg, Whoopi, 35 Hawaii, 110
Goldwater, Barry, 83 Hayes, Isaac, 79
Gooden, Sam, 83 Hendrix, Jimi, 6, 9, 13, 141–145
Goodman, Benny, 69 black-transnational popular music’s
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 108 global gender and sexualized
Gospel music, 3, 43, 73–76, 81, histories, 67–85
83, 85, 94, 109 and cultural Cold War, 100–116
“Got to Give It Up”, 80 and legacy of visual-cultural racial
Graham, Martha, 104 representations, 34–42
Grand Funk Railroad, 47 and racialized popular music
Grappelli, Stéphane, 13, 14 sociology, 42–48
Grateful Dead band, 13, 96 Transnational freak show traditions
Great Britain, see England and, 28–34
Great Depression, 37, 42, 69, 105 and US rock exceptionalism, 96–99
Greatest Showman, The, 31 and Woodstock Festival, 95–96
Great Migration, 26, 37, 38 See also specific entries
Green, Ernest, 113 Hendrix Project, 10
Greenwich Village, 4 “He Will Break Your Heart”, 84
Griffith, D.W., 34 “Hey Joe”, 5
“Grow Closer Together”, 83 High Treason, 109
Guitar, 6–11, 14, 29, 46, 68, 71, Hilton International, 107
73, 83, 84, 95 Hip hop, 10, 11, 45, 82, 85, 93, 144
electric, 2, 8–9, 11, 13, 30, “Hit the Road Jack”, 81
48, 69, 70 Hit the Road Stax, 77
152 INDEX
Hodeir, André, 14 Isley Brothers, 2, 29

Hogan, Carl, 71 “It’s All Over Now”, 3
Holiday, Billie, 4, 10, 143 “It’s All Right”, 83
Hollywood films, 32, 34, 35, 37, I Want You, 80
38, 40–41, 102, 109
Holmès, Augusta, 44
Home to Harlem, 27 J
Hooker, John Lee, 6 J. Geils Band, 3
Hoover, J. Edgar, 112 Jackman, Hugh, 31
Hot Buttered Soul, 79 Jackson, Jesse, 30
Hottentot Venus, 31 Jackson, Michael, 3, 34, 68
Howlin’ Wolf, 46, 76, 95 Jagger, Mick, 75
“How Sweet It Is “Jaguar and Thunderbird”, 72
(To Be Loved By You)”, 78 James, C.L.R., 27, 28
Hughes, Langston, 36, 42 James, Etta, 45
Hurston, Zora Neale, 42 James, Rick, 10
Hyper-sexuality, 5, 29, 93 Jazz, 2–8, 10, 13, 14, 43, 48, 69, 70,
79–82, 93, 94, 100, 102
Jazz Age Paris, 14
I Jefferson Airplane, the, 96
“I’ll Be Doggone”, 78 Jenkins, Barry, 38
“I’m So Proud”, 83 “Jenny Jenny”, 73
“(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”, 77 Jim Crow
“I Can’t Turn You Loose”, 76 codes and conventions, 94
“I Don’t Know What You’ve Got era, 39, 40
But It’s Got Me”, 73 persona, 47
“If 6 was 9”, 29 Jimi Hendrix Experience, The, 4–7,
“I Heard It Through the 12, 13, 29
Grapevine”, 79, 80 Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra, 69
Imperialism, 32, 43, 97–99, “Johnny B. Goode”, 72
101, 111, 112 Johnson, Jack, 39
Impressions, 83, 84 Johnson, Johnnie, 71, 72
“Inner City Blues Johnson, Lyndon, 116
(Makes Me Wanna Holla)”, 79 Johnson, Robert, 30, 144
International Sweethearts Jolson, Al, 39
of Rhythm, 69 Jones, LeRoi, 82
“In the Midnight Hour”, 75 Joplin, Janis, 46, 96
Invisible Man, 26, 27 Jordan, June, 82
Iraq War, 98–99 Jordan, Louis, 71, 73
Irene Davis, Zeinabu, 38 Joseph, Reinhardt, 14
Islamophobia, 99 “Just Out of Reach”, 75
INDEX
153
K Little Rock Nine, 94, 113, 114

“Keep a Knockin’”, 73 “Little Wing”, 6, 68
“Keep on Pushing”, 83 Live album, 13
Kennedy, John F., 111, 113, 115, 116 Living Color, 45
Kennedy Center, 104 Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing
Kerouac, Jack, 106 American Character, The, 112
“Killing Me Softly With His Song”, 81 Long Shadow of Little Rock, The, 114
King, Albert, 3 “Lookin’ for a Love”, 3
King and I, The, 110 Los Angeles Rebellion, 38
“King of Soul”, 75 “Lost Love”, 81
“King of Swing”, 69 “Love’s Theme”, 84
“King of the Fat Men”, 33 Love and Basketball, 37
“King of the One Nighters”, 74 Love Unlimited Orchestra, 84
Knights of Labor, 96 Lowell, Robert, 109
Korean War, 100, 109, 112 “Lucille”, 73
Kozmic Blues Band, 96
Kravitz, Lenny, 10
Kristol, Irving, 103 M
Kronos String Quartet, 10 McCarthy, Joseph, 100, 111
anti-communist campaign, 111
McCarthyism, 102, 109, 111
L McCartney, Paul, 74
Lambert, Daniel, 33 McCarty, Jim, 4
La Montagne Noire, 44 McCullers, Carson, 31
Laughlin, James, 103 McKay, Claude, 27, 28
League of Nations, 27 McLaughlin, John, 13
Led Zeppelin, 4, 29, 47 Madhubuti, Haki R., see Lee, Don L.
Lee, Don L., 82 Mailer, Norman, 112
Lee Daniels’ The Butle, 35 Malcolm X, 34, 36
Leo the Last, 35 “Man and the Donkey”, 71
Les Enfants Terribles, 14 Man Between, The, 109
Let’s Get It On, 80 “Manic Depression”, 5
“Let It Rock”, 72 Mann, Woodrow, 113
Le Village de la Colère, 14 Mann Act, 71
Lilies of the Field, 35 Marley, Bob, 26, 27, 83, 93, 144
Limón, José, 104 Marryat, Florence, 33
Lincoln Motion Picture Company, 40 “Marvellous Indian Boy, The”, 33
“Little Queenie”, 71, 72 Masculinity, 2, 9, 45, 111–113
Little Red Monkey, 109 Massery, Hazel Bryan, 114, 115
“Little Red Rooster”, 76 Maupassant, Guy de, 33
Little Rock Central High School, “Maybellene”, 70
113, 114 Mayfield, Curtis, 68, 77, 83–85
154 INDEX
Mayfield, Percy, 68, 81 National Association for the

Medicine for Melancholy, 38 Advancement of Colored
Member of the Wedding, The, 31 People (NAACP), 37
Memphis Horns, The, 77 National Endowment for the Arts, 104
“Memphis Tennessee”, 72 Ndegeocello, Meshell, 45
“Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)”, 79 Neal, Larry, 82
Micheaux, Oscar, 38, 41 Neil, Fred, 4
Michener, James, 110 Nelson, George, 106
“Mighty, Mighty Neo-soul movement, 10, 45
Spade & Whitey”, 84 New Deal, 105
Miller, Arthur, 106 New York Panther 21, 9
Miller, Jennifer, 32 Nicaraguan Revolutions, 43
“Minister of the New New Super Nigger Factory, The, 83
Heavy Funk, The”, 74 Nixon, Richard, 83
Minstrelsy, 28, 35, 41–43, 47, 68, 73 “No Goodbyes”, 84
Minton’s Playhouse, 70 “No Particular Place to Go”, 71, 72
Mister Rock and Roll, 72, 73
Mitchell, Mitch, 5
Modernization, 28, 105–106 O
Mona Lisa, 35 Obama, Barack, 97
Monk, Thelonious, 70 O’Connor, Flannery, 106
Monster’s Ball, 40 October Revolution, 27
Monterey International Pop Music “One Love/People Get Ready”, 84
Festival (1967), 6, 77 Organization Man, The, 112
Morrison, Toni, 31, 82 Orientalism, 110
Mothers’ League of Orwell, George, 109
Central High School, 114 Ota Benga, 31
Mothershed, Thelma, 113 Otherness, 31–33
Motown Records, 3, 48, 78, 79, 84 bodily, 33
“Move on Up”, 84 Otis Blue, 77
“Mr. Please, Please”, 74 OutKast, 10
Muddy Waters, 4, 30
Murphy, Eddie, 35
My America, 103, 104 P
“My Bottle Is My Companion”, 81 Page, Jimmy, 4, 28
“My Guy”, 79 Parker, Charlie, 70
“My Jug And I”, 81 Parliament-Funkadelic, 10
Pastrana, Julia, 33
Pattillo, Melba, 113
N Patton, Charley, 30
Nabokov, Vladimir, 106 Paul, Les, 8, 13
“Nadine”, 72 Paviot, Paul, 14
“Nashville Sound”, 13 Peace Corps, 111
INDEX
155
Pearl of the South Pacific, 110 R&B, 2, 6, 71–73, 75, 76,

“People Get Ready”, 83 78–81, 84, 109
People-to-People Program, 110 Randian, Prince, 34
P-Funk, 10 Ray, Gloria, 113
“Phallic backbeat”, 68 Redding, Otis, 68, 76–77, 85
Picasso, Pablo, 101 “Red House”, 5, 30
Pickett, Wilson, 68, 74–75 Reed, Ishmael, 82
Piece of the Action, A, 85 “Reelin’ and Rockin’”, 72
Pink Floyd, 8 Reggae, 10, 26, 93
Pizzicato, 83 Reinhardt, Django, 13, 14
Plath, Sylvia, 106 Relf, Keith, 4
Playing Away, 35 “Respect”, 76
“Please Send Me Someone to Love”, 81 “Revolution Will Not Be Televised,
Poitier, Sidney, 35, 37 The”, 82
Pollock, Jackson, 109 Rhythm, 5–8, 12, 29, 30, 46,
Post-World War I era, 27 69–71, 73, 79, 83, 84
Post-World War II era, 106–108 Rice, T.D., 47
music, 3, 4, 42, 76, 94, 109, 110 Richard, Little, 2, 3, 28, 45, 46,
Precious, 35 68, 72–74, 76, 77
Presley, Elvis, 71, 102 Richards, Keith, 8, 71
Prince, 10 Riesman, David, 112
“Promised Land, The”, 72 “River’s Invitation, The”, 81
Pryor, Richard, 35 Road to Bali, 110
Psychedelia, 6, 9, 10, 13 Road to Hong Kong, The, 110
Public Enemy, 85 Roberts, Terrence, 113
Robeson, Paul, 35
Robinson, Smokey, 3, 68, 79
Q Rock and roll, 2–4, 6, 43,
Quasi-religious faith, 97 45–47, 71–74
Queer, 29, 111 “Rock and Roll Music”, 72
global gender and sexual roles, Rock music, 2, 4, 8, 13, 29, 30,
67, 68, 73 44–47, 67, 94, 102, 142–144
Quintette du Hot Club de France, 13 Rock Rock Rock!, 72
Rodgers, Carolyn M., 82
Rodgers, Richard, 110
R Rolling Stone magazine, 7
Rabbit at Rest, 102 Rolling Stones, The, 3, 4, 8, 46,
Racial authenticity, 11, 141, 142 48, 71, 73, 75–77
Racialized popular music, 42–48 “Roll Over Beethoven”, 71
Racial non-conformity, 26 Ronstadt, Linda, 71
Rainbows, The, 78 Russian Revolution, 27
156 INDEX
S Soul Stirrers, 76
Salinger, J.D., 106 South Pacific, 110
Samwell-Smith, Paul, 4 Soviet Union, 100, 101,
Sanchez, Sonia, 82 104–112, 143
Santana, Carlos, 8, 96 Sparkle, 85
Sapphire, 35 Spender, Stephen, 103
Satellite Records, see Stax Records Spike Lee, 34, 41
Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 112 Springsteen, Bruce, 4, 71
“School Days”, 72 Staple Singers, 84
Scott-Heron, Gil, 68, 81–83 “Star-Spangled Banner, The”, 13, 42,
Screaming Headless Torsos, 45 94, 95
Second Persian Gulf War, see Iraq War Star Trek, 34
September 11th, 2001, 98 State Department, 103, 111
“Sex Education Ghetto Style”, 82 Jazz Ambassadors, 101
“Sex Machine, The”, 74 Stax Records, 74, 76
“Sexual Healing”, 80 Stevens, Cat, 76
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Stevenson, Adlai, 112
Club Band, 5 Stewart, Billy, 78
Shange, Ntozake, 82 Stewart, Jim, 74
Shankar, Ravi, 96 Stewart, Rod, 76
“She’s Alright”, 77 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 11
Short Eyes, 85 Stratocaster, Fender, 9
Shostakovich, Dmitry, 101 Styron, William, 106
“Shout Bamalama”, 77 Sul-Te-Wan, Madame, 35
Simon, Paul, 4 Superfly, 85
Simone, Nina, 94 “Super Freak”, 10
Singleton, John, 41 Supremes, The, 3
“(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay”, 77 “Surfin’ USA”, 71
Slovakia, 45 Sweden, 45
Sly and the Family Stone, 10, 96 “Sweet Home Chicago”, 30
Sly Stone, 10 “Sweet Little Sixteen”, 71, 72
Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, 82 Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, 34
Social identities, 43 Stax Records, 74, 76–77
“Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless
Child”, 96
Song of the South, 39 T
Songs, see specific entries Tamla Records, 78
Soul music, 2–3, 6, 8–11, 46, Taylor, James, 3
73–85, 93 Taylor, Johnnie, 76
“Soul Brother #1”, 74 Temple, Shirley, 33
Soul Man, 35 Tennessee Valley Authority
Souls of Sin, 40 (TVA), 105
INDEX
157
Terrell, Tammi, 79 V
“These Arms of Mine”, 76 Vai, Steve, 8
“Third Stone from the Sun”, 5 Valentinos, 3
“This Is My Country”, 84 Vampire’s Assistant, The, 31
Thomas, Jefferson, 113 Van Halen, Eddie, 8, 28
“Three Days of Peace and Music”, 95 Van Halen band, 8
Thumb, Tom, 33 Van Peebles, Melvin, 34
Thurman, Wallace, 41 Victorian England, 32–33
Time, 101 Vietnam War, 7, 9, 79, 94, 105,
Tin Pan Alley, 43 106, 110–112
Tommy, 96 Visual-cultural racial representation
“Too Much Monkey Business”, 72 legacy, 34–42
Topham, Anthony (Top), 4 Voice of America, 103
Totalitarianism, 112 Volt Records, 76
Towles, Nat, 69 Voodoo, 9, 12, 27, 29
Townshend, Pete, 5, 26, 28 “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)”, 12
Traffic and Jefferson Airplane, 7 Vulture, The, 83
Training Day, 37
Transnational blackness, 27, 28
Transnational freak show traditions, W
28–34 Wadleigh, Michael, 95
Trouble Man, 80 Walker, Alice, 82
Truman, Harry S., 115 Walker, T-Bone, 30, 71
Administration, 103 Walls, Carlotta, 113
Turner, Ike, 3, 46 War on Terror, 106
Turner, Tina, 3, 46 Warren, Earl, 115, 116
“Tutti Frutti”, 73 Washington, Denzel, 37
“Two Lovers”, 79 Waters, Ethel, 35
Wayne’s World, 68
Wells, Mary, 79
U Weston, Kim, 79
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 11 What’s Going On?, 78–80
“Uncle Tom” insult, 11, 30 White, Barry, 80, 84
Updike, John, 102 White, Jack, 8
“Up From the Skies”, 6 White Stripes, The, 8
Urban settings, 37 White supremacy, 7, 12, 37, 48, 82,
US Armed Forces, 7 113, 142, 144
US empire, 27, 142 Who, The, 5, 96
US exceptionalism, 2, 12, 13, 94, Whyte, William, 112
96–100, 142, 143 Wiggins, Thomas “Blind Tom”, 45
US Information Agency, 103 Williams, Mary Lou, 69
USSR, see Soviet Union Williams, Tennessee, 106
158 INDEX
Winburn, Anna Mae, 69 World War I, 103

“Wind Cries Mary”, The, 9, 68 World War II (WWII),
“Winter In America”, 82 14, 100–102, 111
Womack & Womack, 3 Wright, Billy, 73
Womack, Bobby, 3, 76
Womack, Cecil, 3
Women’s Emergency Committee Y
to Open Our Schools, 114 Yardbirds, 4
“Wonderful World”, 77 “You’re the Man”, 80
Woodberry, Billy, 38 “You Beat Me to the Punch”, 79
Woodstock (documentary), 95 “You Can’t Catch Me”, 71
Woodstock Festival, 7, 13, 29, 42, “You Must Believe in Me”, 83
94–96 “You Never Can Tell”, 72
Woodstock Music and Young, Lester, 69
Art Fair, The, 95 You Only Live Twice, 110

Jimi Hendrix and The Cultural Politics of Popular Music 2018

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JIMI HENDRIX AND

ISBN 978-3-319-77012-3 ISBN 978-3-319-77013-0 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018935694

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover pattern © Melisa Hasan

Printed on acid-free paper

1 Jimi Hendrix—Gypsy Eyes, Voodoo Child,

2 “I Don’t Want to Be a Clown Anymore”: Jimi Hendrix

3 Jimi Hendrix and Black-Transnational Popular Music’s

4 Jimi Hendrix, the 1960s Counterculture,

Jimi Hendrix—Gypsy Eyes, Voodoo Child,

Abstract Focusing on Jimi Hendrix’s relationships with the transnational

Keywords Gypsy • Voodoo • Counterculture • Rhythm and Blues

Transversing US, UK, and transnational racial hierarchies, with strong

© The Author(s) 2018 1

comedy recordings, released on the Chess, Checker, Argo, and Cadet

expression of the countercultural generation, denoting a type of self-

lighter fuel. Defining Hendrix as an artist and appearing on the cover of

Hendrix had an idiosyncratic and compelling vocal style, a form of

appeal, has not made it into the pantheon of twentieth-century black-­

exotic race, gender, and sexuality. A black-transnational subject uniquely

Hamilton, “Sexual Politics and African-American Music; Or, Placing Little

(Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2007); Bill Kirchner, A Miles Davis

168–182; Ioana Szeman, “‘Gypsy Music’ and Deejays: Orientalism,

McDonald, Michael Bruce. “Training the Nineties, or the Present Relevance of

Walser, Robert. “Out of Notes: Signification, Interpretation, and the Problem of

“I Don’t Want to Be a Clown Anymore”:

Abstract This chapter connects Hendrix to black-transnational vernacu-

Keywords Freak Culture • Bob Dylan • Racialized Popular Music

In musical and extra-musical terms, Jimi Hendrix’s racial significance links

© The Author(s) 2018 25

an electrifying rock-influenced hybrid that transformed him into a trans-

In models of racial, gender, and sexual revolution and belonging not

Hendrix and Transnational “Freak Show” Traditions

success as an exquisitely voiced vocalist specializing in warm ballads and

with exceptional live shows. Hendrix drew on black-transnational culture

their capacity for reinvention. Devoid of inherent, fixed meanings, the

nineteenth-century fiction raised questions about relationships between

Hendrix and a Legacy of Visual-Cultural Racial

With a resubordination of black people in Reagan-era films,22 in such

When a triple crown of Academy Awards was awarded to Denzel

In early relationships between US racial dynamics and cinema, African-­

end to cinematic mischaracterizations, which, they believed, violated

Birth of a Nation. From 1909, black newspapers produced celebratory

Hendrix and the Sociology of Racialized

collective behavior and social movements, education, institutions (e.g.,

political, and cultural contexts.51 In the location of memories and histories

Hendrix’s rock, as well as that of other musicians, played an integral role

US performing pianists. Although he lived and died before autism was

cultural plunder, including blackface minstrel pioneer T.D. Rice

unforgettable musical works of the US civil rights era, the revolution of

2000); Jules-Rosette Bennetta, Black Paris: The African Writers’ Landscape

Whiting Up: Whiteface Minstrels and Stage Europeans in African American

2005); Alan Nadel, Flatlining on the Field of Dreams: Cultural Narratives

Xlibris Corp., 2008); Valerie Smith, ed., Representing Blackness: Issues in

Blues Tradition,” Phylon (1960–) 42.1 (1st Qtr., 1981): 60–72;

Bennetta, Jules-Rosette. Black Paris: The African Writers’ Landscape. Urbana:

Lloyd, Craig. Eugene Bullard, Black Expatriate in Jazz-Age Paris. Athens:

Seewood, André. Slave Cinema: The Crisis of the African-American in Film.

Jimi Hendrix and Black-Transnational

Abstract This chapter contends that Hendrix, though commonly thought

Keywords Queer • Falsetto • Electric Guitar • Gospel

Though in one sense he was part of rock music’s pantheon of hyper-­

1 Jimi Hendrix—Gypsy Eyes, Voodoo Child,

2 “I Don’t Want to Be a Clown Anymore”: Jimi Hendrix

3 Jimi Hendrix and Black-Transnational Popular Music’s

4 Jimi Hendrix, the 1960s Counterculture,

appeal, has not made it into the pantheon of twentieth-century black-

In early relationships between US racial dynamics and cinema, African-

Though in one sense he was part of rock music’s pantheon of hyper-

Hendrix, Woodstock, and a Legacy of Black-

a non-Soviet worldview. As tensions constrained post-Stalinist mass-media