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Sharon Lawrence started her career as a reporter for the United Press International's Los Angeles bureau. Her specialty was the entertainment beat, including film and pop music. After more than five years with UPI, she became a management, marketing, and PR consultant for such clients as MCA, Columbia, Apple, and Rocket Record Company, as well as for major movie studios. She has worked with numerous artists including Elton John, David Bowie, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Tim Rice, and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Lawrence is the author of So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star and Old Carmel in Rare Photographs. She lives in Los Angeles.

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The genius we never understood. . . . The man we never knew. . . . The truth we never heard. . . . The music we never forgot. . . . A revealing portrait of a legend by a close and trusted friend.

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Jimi Hendrix

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Chapter One

Johnny/Jimmy

She loved a good time. There were few of them in her short and wretched life.

Lucille Jeter shook off the gloomy blanket of wartime anxieties that troubled all the adults around her, and despite her family's admonitions, she ignored the tedious drip ... drip ... drip of the Seattle evening rain to go out and dance every chance she got.

The sweet-natured and naïve "baby" of the Jeter family, Lucille had a brother and three older sisters. Their parents, Preston and Clarice, were typical of many of the black residents of Seattle in the 1940s, men and women who had migrated west, seeking a better life but frequently disappointed. Born in Virginia, Preston Jeter possessed education but few opportunities. He worked, at various times, as a miner and as a longshoreman. His wife, Clarice, a native of Arkansas, brought in much-needed income toiling as cleaning lady and housekeeper. Welfare checks sometimes entered the picture. Mrs. Jeter's Pentecostal religion was both her rock and her social life; she worried and prayed about Lucille and her always fragile health. Lucille was inclined to overdo.

The sight of the pretty, tiny, pale-skinned black girl kicking up her heels and the sound of her giddy laughter as she was tossed into the air captivated Al Hendrix. It seemed that she would never get enough of the bright lights and spirited jitterbug rhythms. Lucille loved her music!

The exhilarating nights on the dance floor didn't last long. Weeks after the couple's first meeting, Lucille became pregnant and hurriedly married twenty-two-year-old Al, an attractive if not handsome bantam rooster of a man, standing barely five foot two. She told her mother that she liked the way Al smiled at her.

Her young husband was an American citizen raised in Vancouver, British Columbia, who had settled in Seattle several years before to try his luck as a lightweight boxer in the city 's Golden Gloves competition. Al 's father, Ross Hendrix, was an Ohio native who grew up to become a Chicago policeman and eventually, making an exotic switch, took a job as stagehand for a vaudeville troupe. He married one of the dancers in the company, Nora Moore, the daughter of a full-blooded Cherokee mother and an Irish father. Nora and Ross Hendrix decided to give up the traveling life and make a new start in Vancouver. In quick succession Nora gave birth to two sons, a daughter, and finally to James Allen Hendrix, generally known as Al.

Since his education had ceased in the seventh grade and he was unprepared for any skilled work, Al turned to the love of dancing he 'd inherited from his mother to making a few bucks here and there in dance contests. His specialties were tap dancing, jitterbugging, and solo improvisations. Although Al later was to refer to himself as a member of an important show business family, Mama Nora worked long hours in the kitchen of a Vancouver restaurant after she left vaudeville; as a teenager Al was a waiter there.

When he married Lucille, Al had perhaps only three things in common with his sixteen-year-old wife: They both were the youngest children in their respective families, they each loved to dance, and they had a child on the way. Within days after their marriage on March 31, 1942, Al kissed Lucille good-bye. Drafted into the army, he was sent more than fifteen hundred miles away to Oklahoma, and then on to Georgia.

Lucille was barely seventeen when she gave birth to her first son, Johnny, on November 27, 1942. The birth took place at the home of Dorothy Harding, a good friend to Lucille 's sister Dolores. Relatives and friends joked about how strange it was that these two short peoplehad conceived such a graceful, long-limbed baby.

Raising a baby was no joke, and Lucille was unprepared to handle the transition from dropout schoolgirl to mother. Through an army snafu, she was not receiving any of Al's military pay. Not long after Johnny was born, Preston Jeter died of a heart condition. As a result, Clarice was plagued by financial problems. She loved Lucille's baby, but she couldn't take care of him and also work five days a week. Clarice and her daughter Dolores were deeply concerned about Johnny's welfare as he was shuttled around a circle of relatives, friends, and even complete strangers in homes in and near Seattle. Week to week Johnny never was quite sure who was "in charge" -- a phrase that stayed with him. He slept on pillows, in baskets, and in other people's beds; a real baby crib was a luxury Johnny seldom knew. Lucille floated in and out of Johnny 's life, the "Mama" he adored -- even if the young girl couldn't support him or manage to take care of him for more than a few days at a time ...

Excerpted from Jimi Hendrixby Sharon Lawrence Copyright © 2006 by Sharon Lawrence. Excerpted by permission.
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