David Henderson, the poet and author "who rose to prominence with the pathbreaking Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and went on to write a bestselling biography of Jimi Hendrix that changed the way many interpreted Hendrix's life, music, and untimely end," died May 14, the New York Times reported. He was 83.
The Harlem-born poet was a central figure in the founding in 1962 of the Society of Umbra, a pioneering Black literary collective based in Manhattan's East Village. The Times noted that like Calvin Hernton, Tom Dent, Lorenzo Thomas, Askia Touré, Steve Cannon, and others associated with the group, Henderson "sought to forge a new, distinctly Black aesthetic sensibility, unmoored from white Western artistic ideals."
"We were shut out of the discourse," he recalled in a 2009 interview with Africultures, a French news and culture website. "That exclusion is what Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, James Baldwin, were fighting."
Umbra became a foundation for the broader Black Arts Movement, which emerged in the mid-1960s and was led by writers such as LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), Lawrence Neal, and Touré. The group also included people from the visual arts, theater, dance, and music.
"We were the revolutionaries," said poet and playwright Ishmael Reed, adding that no longer did Black writers find it necessary to follow the narrative conventions of an Ernest Hemingway or Henry James. "We broke with that. We went to folklore, and to the street."
Henderson channeled the hope and rage of the civil rights era, drawing from Black oral traditions and the rhythms of rock 'n' roll, Motown, and jazz, the Times noted, quoting lines from the title poem of his 1970 collection De Mayor of Harlem:
silent natives screaming
thru western guns swords axes
tall tenor saxophones
blaring black trumpet
pages of swords.
Henderson left home as a teenager and moved to the East Village to pursue poetry. "This was the early 1960s," he later recalled. "Change was happening before our eyes, but I'm not certain I saw it." In the early 1970s, he was hired to teach at the University of California, Berkeley, the first of several academic positions he held over the years.
Soon after arriving in California, he began a five-year quest to complete a book on Hendrix, whom he had written about previously for the rock magazine Crawdaddy. "I had gotten to know Hendrix a little bit in the clubs in Manhattan, hanging out," Henderson once recalled in a video interview, "and I told him I was going to write something about him."
His friendship with Hendrix "helped open doors, spurring many who had been close to the guitar legend to open up, including his father, Al Hendrix," the Times noted. Henderson also gained access to Hendrix's personal diaries, private correspondence and home recordings.
Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child of the Aquarian Age was published in 1978. (It was later expanded and retitled 'Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky: Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child.) "The book stood out among rock biographies for its New Journalism-style narrative approach, which included flowery poetic passages and--to the chagrin of some critics--recreated inner monologues and other devices reminiscent of fiction," the Times wrote.
The biography also challenged accepted views of the circumstances leading to Hendrix's death in 1970. Henderson concluded that Hendrix did not die of a drug overdose, but was drowned, and contended that other forces, including organized crime and federal agencies, had motives to harm the musician.
Henderson also wrote that Hendrix came to embrace Black power every bit as much as flower power: "Jimi Hendrix was a classic Black ghetto 'smoothie,' whose genius was electric guitar. He achieved an unmatched virtuoso style and became a musician's musician, a player's player, and a priest of the new age in Afro-American ceremonial music."