Jimi Hendrix's birth place

James Marshall Hendrix was born on November 27, 1942, at King County Hospital in Seattle -- now known as Harborview Medical Center at 325 9th Avenue on First Hill. His father Al Hendrix was stationed in the Army at the time, and his mother Lucille was 17 years old. The family settled in Seattle's Central District after Al was discharged, and it was in that working-class Black neighbourhood that Jimi grew up, first playing guitar on a broom handle and then on a cheap acoustic his father bought him for five dollars when he was a teenager.

Seattle's claim on Hendrix is real and substantial: the city shaped his early musical formation, from the R&B he heard at Black clubs in the Central District to the gospel music of the churches he attended. He attended Garfield High School, where he was more interested in drawing and music than in academics. He enlisted in the Army in 1961 partly to avoid a potential petty theft charge, served as a paratrooper, and then drifted through the American club circuit before landing in London in 1966 -- returning to Seattle only occasionally after that.

Harborview Medical Center at 325 9th Avenue is still a functioning hospital and Level I trauma centre, one of the busiest in the Pacific Northwest. There is no plaque marking Hendrix's birth there -- the hospital has more pressing concerns. The Central District neighbourhood where he grew up has undergone significant gentrification in recent decades, and many of the landmarks of Hendrix's childhood Seattle have been replaced. The Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP) in Seattle holds an extraordinary Hendrix archive.