Was Jimi Hendrix Barack Obama's Father?

A little semi-comic relief from election news

For those of tender age, Jimi Hendrix was the rock world’s preeminent guitarist of the 1960s. In my 2011 book Deconstructing Obama, I trolled the leftist media by suggesting Hendrix may have been Barack Obama’s father. Not surprisingly, they took the bait.

The late Simon Maloy of Media Matters called my thesis “outlandish” and dismissed the book as “aggressively stupid,” “terminally self-unaware,” and “pathetically festooned with self-aggrandizing tripe.” But otherwise, Simon?

Looking back, I have to say that Jimi Hendrix remains a better candidate to be Obama’s father than Barack Obama Sr. There is a reason Obama and the DNC spent millions resisting the call to produce a birth certificate. I believe it has more to do with when Obama was born than where he was born.

In high school, Obama’s mother Ann Dunham proved to be something of a rebel—a liberal and wannabe beatnik who hung out at Seattle jazz bars and once even hit the road with a friend Kerouac-style. In the retelling, Ann is inevitably from Kansas. The five formative year she spent in Seattle are scrubbed from the record.

The one possibility that makes the most sense of the facts surrounding Obama’s birth is that she had a black lover on the mainland. We do know that in the summer of 1960 the Dunhams abruptly pulled up stakes and, over Ann’s strenuous objections, moved to Hawaii. Obama’s mainstream biographers cannot agree on why Ann’s parents did this, but they all avoid the obvious reason.

In 1960, parents routinely sent their pregnant daughters to visit an “aunt” in some distant city before the girl started to show. In 1960, if the baby’s father was black, a white mother-to-be could go no place more welcoming than Hawaii. There a biracial child had a decent chance of growing up without stigma.

In the official story, Ann meets Barack Obama in a Russian class. This much is likely true. Much more suspect is the notion that Obama falls in love with Ann. Pulitzer Prize winner David Garrow is the most honest and unsparing of the biographers. He writes, “In truth, as one scholar would acutely put it, Barack Hussein Obama was only ‘a sperm donor in his son’s life.’” Obama confirms as much when he admits he never saw the Kenyan Barack Obama before he was ten.

Barack Obama’s official date of birth is August 4, 1961. Presuming a normal pregnancy, Ann would have conceived the child in early November, an estimated six weeks after starting class. Rebellious and infatuated with exotic men, she could have met and promptly seduced or been seduced by Obama. Just as likely, she and her father could have been on the lookout for someone willing to put his name on the birth certificate.

In 1961, Africans had higher status in America than African Americans. An African who wanted to have his student visa extended could see the merits in marrying a pregnant American girl even if he did have a wife back in Kenya. What cannot be denied is that Obama and Stanley Dunham became buddies. A photo captures them arm-in-arm when Obama leaves for Harvard a year and a half after he allegedly knocked up Dunham’s underage daughter. One other variable: Ann does not enroll for the second semester at the University of Hawaii. If she were just a couple months pregnant there would be no reason not to. Mumus cover a lot of sins.

As Garrow notes, Ann and Barack reportedly flew to Maui on February 2, 1961, and were married there. He admits, however, that no contemporary documents have ever been located. Even less helpful is the account by Janny Scott, the New York Times reporter who spent two years researching her 2011 biography of Ann Dunham, A Singular Woman. Although Scott spends thirty pages documenting Ann’s high school years in Seattle, she spends just two pages covering her courtship with Obama, the marriage, and birth.

On page eighty-four of the book, Scott writes, “Obama was twenty-four years old and Ann was seventeen when they met in the fall of 1960.” On page eighty-six, she tells the reader that baby Obama was born in Honolulu and “eleven months later, the elder Obama was gone.” That’s it.

As to the wedding itself, Scott can tell the reader no more than Garrow can. She also fails to comment on Ann Dunham’s whereabouts from the day of the alleged wedding in February 1961 to Obama’s reported birth in August 1961. Not a single word. There are no credible witnesses to any kind of relationship. There are no photos of a pregnant Ann or of a newborn Obama.

This brings us back to Obama’s Seattle problem. In his 2012 biography David Maraniss finally concedes what the alternative conservative media had first reported in 2008, namely that Ann Dunham emerged in Seattle with her baby in time to register at the University of Washington for the fall semester of 1961.

“Within a month of the day Barry came home from the hospital,” Maraniss writes of baby Obama, “he and his mother were long gone from Honolulu, back on the mainland, returned to the more familiar turf of Mercer Island and Seattle and the campus of the University of Washington.” Garrow acknowledges the same. Somehow, Obama’s official campaign biography, David Remnick’s biography, Scott’s bio of Ann Dunham, and Obama’s Dreams all either botched the timeline or missed the Seattle sojourn altogether.

Parents who moved abruptly to Hawaii to protect their daughter’s reputation would have had little compunction about registering a home birth six months after it actually happened, the final step in a well-executed plan to save face and give their grandson an identity. It’s possible that Ann fled Hawaii alone in late August 1961 with a baby who was just a few weeks old, but her decision to leave would seem much more prudent if the baby had been born several months prior.

It is possible Obama himself did not know the truth when he started spinning what Bill Clinton called his “fairy tale” about the Kenyan goatherd and the Kansas farm girl. That would have been a hard story to take back, even if Jimi Hendrix were his father.

In the summer of 1960, a fellow named “Johnny” was making his reputation in Seattle’s club scene as a left-handed guitarist 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.

After Ann left for Hawaii, Johnny joined the Army. He caused enough trouble to get himself quickly booted. Ann was back living in Seattle when Johnny left the Army, but instead of returning home, he decided to try his luck in Nashville. In the spirit of mischief, I have to ask whether this was the reason Ann, as her friends reported, seemed so down in the summer of 1962.

Of course, as you may have guessed, Johnny decided to use the stage name “Jimi” and changed the spelling of his last name from “Hendricks” to “Hendrix.” In a further Paul-is-dead kind of twist, Obama cites as his personal marker for 1967—the summer he turned six—the fact that “Jimi Hendrix performed at Monterey.”

Weird too is that Obama can remember the year of the Monterey Pop Jazz Festival but not the year he met Michelle, the year his half-brother died, the year he first visited Africa, or the year his parents married.

The media need a sobering up so they can get back to the kind of reporting they abandoned about a half century ago. Here’s hoping November 5 is the catalyst.