The Case for Jimi Hendrix as Barack Obama's Father

It Is Not As Far Fetched As It Might Seen

Early in his acclaimed 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama addresses the subject of his origins. In 1961, as he rightly acknowledges, being born to parents of different races could ruffle feathers all around. It wasn’t until 1967, he notes, that the “the Supreme Court of the United States would get around to telling the state of Virginia that its ban on interracial marriages violated the Constitution.”

And how does Obama remember 1967? That was the year, he recalls, “I celebrated my sixth birthday and Jimi Hendrix performed at Monterey.” In the following sentence, Obama makes an observation that is at best half correct, “In 1960, the year that my parents were married, miscegenation still described a felony in over half the states in the Union.”

In these few sentences, Obama suggests why his grandparents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, abruptly quit Seattle for Hawaii with their wild child daughter Ann in tow. Giving birth out of wedlock was scandal enough in 1960. Giving birth to a mixed-race child was downright transgressive everywhere—except, maybe, Hawaii.

Obama may have also suggested who impregnated the impressionable Ann. Of all the landmarks to remember 1967 by—the fatal fire on Apollo 1, the Six-Day War, the Summer of Love, the release of Sergeant Pepper, the confirmation of the first black Supreme Court judge—the left-handed Obama singled out left-handed guitarist Jimi Hendrix’s appearance at Monterey Pop as the landmark event.

There was an excellent chance Ann Dunham knew Jimi Hendrix. In the summer of 1960, Hendrix—then Jimmy Hendricks—was making his reputation in Seattle’s club scene with a local band known as the Rocking Kings. Two days older than Ann, this tall, thin young black man was not at all abashed about dating white women. Indeed, he was allegedly thrown out of high school for holding a white girl’s hand.

In high school, the rebellious Ann Dunham would have been receptive. A liberal and wannabe beatnik, Ann hung out at Seattle jazz bars and once even hit the road with a friend Kerouac-style. While still in high school, Ann saw the celebrated 1959 Franco-Brazilian film Black Orpheus and was especially smitten by the film’s male lead, black Brazilian actor Breno Mello.

Obama speaks about his mother’s reaction to this film at length in Dreams. In the summer before his senior year in college, Ann visited him in New York and dragged him to see Black Orpheus at a revival house. Obama was bored. Ann was not. She explained that she had first seen the film in the summer before her senior year in high school while working as an au pair in Chicago.

“I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen,” Ann tells her son. An embarrassed Obama considers her enthusiasm “a reflection of the simple fantasies that had been forbidden to a white middle-class girl from Kansas.” He may have underestimate his mother.

As I have argued elsewhere, the “when” of Obama’s birth may have inspired Obama’s resistance to sharing his birth certificate, not the “where.” Obama and his operatives invested enormous political capital in what biographer David Remnick called his “signature appeal: the use of the details of his own life as a reflection of a kind of multicultural ideal.” If, in fact, the Kenyan Obama were not his father, the whole ideal would be shot. The “improbable love” between Ann and Barack would have seemed no more substantial than the love between, say, Diddy and Cassie or Brigitte and Emmanuel.

Ann returned to Seattle with baby Obama in tow but without Obama Sr. for the 1961 fall semester at the University of Washington, but Hendrix had joined the Army several months earlier. In June 1962, Hendrix was discharged from the Army but decided to try his luck in Nashville. At about that same time, for reasons never made clear, Ann quit Seattle and returned to Hawaii.

In the section from Dreams cited in the opening paragraph above, Obama makes two observations that cry out for clarification. For one, he places his parents’ marriage in 1960. If Ann and Barack did marry—no one has yet to turn up a marriage license—February 1961 is the most likely date. Obama seems to have improvised much of his own origins story.

And then there is the Jimi Hendrix reference. Where, one wonders, could this have come from if not his mother? Mooning about the doomed rocker does not confirm Ann as Hendrix’s baby mama, but it does make Hendrix a suspect, a more likely suspect, in fact, than Barack Obama Sr.

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