"Is the microphone on?"

Those are Jimi Hendrix's first words on the master studio recording of "Hey Baby (New Rising Sun)", one of my favorite of his songs.  Hendrix was working, sporadically and at great expense, on a double record called "First Rays of the New Rising Sun" for two years before his untimely death in September of 1970.  He was nowhere near finished with it when he died.  A number of possible tracklists exist, none more than tentative.  One of the standout tracks for it, though, is the rather prosaically titled "Hey Baby".  This song was a regular feature in his 1970 sets, but he had yet to record a finished studio recording of it.  The familiar take, released by people who would take what they could get after his death, is of a complete studio rehearsal.  He sings the first line as "Hey, baby, where do you coming from?", getting the lyrics mixed up as well.

That was the nature of Hendrix.  Perfection was not this thing.  There is a posthumously released take of his blues standard "Red House", the so-called "Electric Church" Red House, where he loses it in the middle of the take and ends it in a squall of feedback.  This doesn't matter to me.  There's never any question of "what could have been"; it's just a matter of recognizing what was.  The "Electric Church" Red House is complete and finished as it is.  In the case of "Hey Baby (New Rising Sun)", the singing may be tentative, but the playing is not.  As often is the case with Jimi, the guitar picks up the message where his facility with words falls short.

Other songs of his pose more problems.  Hendrix had a song called "Valleys of Neptune" he was working on in 1969.  After a truly transcendent end to his (patchy and sparsely attended) set at Woodstock, he came back for an encore and announced that he would be playing "Valleys of Neptune"... and then abruptly changed his mind and closed with his initial hit, "Hey Joe", a song he was extremely bored of at this point in his career.  No recording of this song emerged for decades, because no complete recording was ever made, only a patchwork of incomplete takes.  Finally in 2010 a recording was assembled.  Even then, among fans, there were grumbles.  John Scannell, whose transcendent re-envisioning of "First Rays" remains my go-to imagining of the record, was notably critical of the mix, believing it could have been done better, and based on what he's done with the work of Hendrix, I believe him.

The aspect of Jimi's music that appealed to me most was his search for the transcendent.  Under the sea, in space, through religion, these were all the same: a quest for the unknown, for breaking through the intense pain that marked so much of his life.  In doing this Jimi specifically drew from a tradition of Black suffering that is and remains forever alien to me as a white woman.  "Hey Baby" is a song in the tradition of Curtis Mayfield's "People Get Ready".  "Hey Baby" speaks of a visitation from a woman from... beyond.  Atlantis, Jupiter, heaven, doesn't matter where precisely.  She brings a call, a summons, and the summons is "We gotta help your people out right now".  This is unquestionably a call for Black power and solidarity.  But Jimi was also, and he struggled with this all his life - he was a "crossover" artist.  Some people in his time would phrase him as "sell-out".  Another way we might put that these days is "intersectional".