The Drama of Jimi Hendrix’s Early Childhood: Cheating, Foster Care, and Alcoholism

Jimi Hendrix was a beloved rock legend gone too soon at the age of 27. The early days of Hendrix’s life were marked by turmoil at home, giving him a turbulent life practically from the time he was born.

Jimi Hendrix had a difficult upbringing

Philip Norman’s 2020 book Wild Thing: The Short, Spellbinding Life of Jimi Hendrix dives into Hendrix’s life from before his birth, exploring his parents’ relationship both before and after the future music icon was born.

“In December 1941, Japan launched its surprise bombing attack on Pearl Harbor, thereby bringing America into the Second World War. [Jimi’s father] Al, who by now was racking balls in a pool hall, realized he would soon be drafted and, with [his mother] Lucille already pregnant, decided they should get married as soon as possible,” Norman recounted. “The wedding took place in March 1942; three days later, Al joined the army, which immediately spirited him away, and his young bride returned to high school.”

Because Lucille didn’t receive any of Al’s army pay for a year, she was forced to quit school and find work in clubs and bars in Seattle, either as a waiter or as a singer, as she had a good singing voice. But things soon took a turn for the worse. “The once-innocent girl developed a taste for alcohol that quickly turned into a craving,” Norman wrote. Al was upset that it took a long time for a photo of his child to reach him in combat in the Pacific. “He complained that Lucille barely wrote to him while he was away fighting for his country (although never in any serious danger-zone). In fairness, she had problems over and above that of becoming a teenage mother. Her father had died, bringing on a recurrence of the psychiatric problems that had always plagued her mother, and her family home had burned down, destroying everything in it.”

“Without Al’s army pay or much support from his parents, who disapproved of her nocturnal life on Jackson Street, Lucille was forced to turn to other men for financial aid and to pay its inevitable price. Before long, Dear John letters began to reach Al, signed ‘A Friend’ and informing him of his wife’s infidelities and failures as a mother apparently so serious that another couple were seeking to adopt their son,” Norman continued. “The explosive Al made no attempt to discover the truth of the matter but, from the far Pacific, immediately started divorce proceedings.”

Jimi Hendrix was raised in foster care

The young Jimi Hendrix was eventually given to a woman named Mrs. Champ in Berkeley, California, who raised him as a foster child. Rather than comfort the child who had just been snatched away from the only parent he knew, Al physically hurt him in public. “‘I gave [him] his first spanking on that train,’ Al would recall almost proudly in his autobiography.”

Eventually, Hendrix’s parents attempted to mend fences. “Al and Lucille had decided to try to patch up their marriage. But the newly demobilized soldier had little taste for ordinary domesticity and the former Jackson Street habituée, not much more,” Norman wrote. “Their home life soon became a continuous round of drunken parties that often ended in a screaming row between the two of them and Lucille’s disappearance, sometimes for hours, sometimes days or weeks.”

His father punished him for using his left hand

Part of Hendrix’s father’s abusive parenting was a result of his own physical deformities: he was born with an extra finger on each hand, which was viewed as demonic back in the day. “Back then, such infant deformities were widely believed to be marks of the Devil for which, not long previously, the luckless infant would have been quietly suffocated. However, infanticide had given way to do-it-yourself amputation: Zenora [James’ mother, Jimi’s grandmother] was advised to bind the superfluous digits with silk cords, starving them of blood until they simply dropped. This they did, only to grow back in an undersized, shriveled form, complete with miniature nails,” Norman wrote.

Later, after Hendrix was born, his parents discovered that he was left-handed, also considered devilish at the time. As a result, his father “set about correcting it in the only way he knew how. If ever [Jimi] were caught using the ‘wrong’ hand, he could expect an angry swipe around the head.” 

Hendrix joined the likes of Paul McCartney and Kurt Cobain, themselves famed left-handed guitarists.