Before he held his ill-fated Harlem concert, Hendrix told a New York Times reporter why he returned to his old neighborhood.
"Sometimes when I come up here, people say, 'He plays white rock for white people,' " Hendrix said. " 'What's he doing up here?' Well, I want to show them that music is universal -- that there is no white rock or black rock."
Hendrix's quest for acceptance among his own people was a lifelong journey. He first tried to make it among black clubs on the Chitlin' Circuit, but his virtuoso guitar playing didn't fit the black popular music taste of the time.
"There was no place for Hendrix," Tate, the journalist, says. Black music then "was based around the style of singing, harmony and production of Motown."
Hendrix even stopped by black radio stations to encourage them to play his music to no avail, says Cross, author of "Room Full of Mirrors."
"It was very upsetting to him that he was not accepted in African-American radio stations," Cross says.
Hendrix didn't want to be confined by racial categories, but musical audiences were segregated like the rest of America, Cross says.
"Because Jimi played to white fans in an era of Black Power and separatism, they felt that he had betrayed his own race by having a white band and playing to an audience that was primarily white," Cross says.
Hendrix aggressively reached out to black audiences during the last two years of his life. He grew an Afro, wrote protest-themed songs and replaced his white bandmates with two black friends to form the Band of Gypsies. The group released a live album featuring Hendrix's classic, "Machine Gun."
The "Band of Gypsies" album gave hints of a new musical direction for Hendrix. He had befriended jazz musicians like Miles Davis who encouraged him to stretch. (The two had discussed making a recording together.) Hendrix was experimenting with larger bands, adding percussion and recording songs that sounded like a cross between jazz fusion and funk music. He told friends he was tired of the sexual showmanship and playing the Psychedelic Superspade.
