It’s 7 am in the morning on June 4th, 1942. In the midst of the Pacific Ocean, Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi paces the bridge of the immense Japanese aircraft carrier, the Hiryū. Today he bears the great honor of commanding two aircraft carriers, the Hiryū and the Sōryū. Alongside two other carriers, the Akagi and Kaga,…
You hear his name and something settles in almost without you noticing it. Elvis. For most people, that’s enough to trigger a familiar image. A performance, a movement, maybe a clip they’ve seen more times than they can count. [music] It comes quickly, like something already prepared in the mind, ready to be replayed. But…
1965, a racist TV host publicly humiliated Bumpy Johnson on live television, calling him a savage in front of 3 million viewers. But Bumpy didn’t explode with rage. Instead, he smiled. And within 30 minutes, that host lost everything. his career, his family, his entire life. How did one calm man destroy another without throwing…
Nina Simone told Jimmyi Hendris to play piano as a joke. What he played left her in tears and changed everything. It was October 1967 and a small gathering was happening in a Greenwich Village apartment. The kind of gathering that only happened in New York in the late60s. Jazz musicians, rock guitarists, poets, and…
London 1969. A 72-year-old man named Albert Smokeoky Davis sat in the corner of the Blue Note Club playing guitar to a crowd that wasn’t listening. He had been a blues guitarist for 50 years, but time had forgotten him. Then he started playing a Jimmy Hendris song, not copying it, but playing it the…
Seattle, 1968. Jimmy Hendris was walking through his old neighborhood when he saw something in a pawn shop window that made his heart stop. It was his first guitar, the battered Dane Electro that his father had bought him for $15 when he was 15 years old. The guitar he’d learned to play on that…
London, 1969. Jimmyi Hendris was walking down Carnaby Street after a recording session when he heard something that made him stop dead in his tracks. Someone was playing his song. But it sounded wrong, broken, struggling, desperate. He turned the corner and saw a teenage kid sitting on the pavement with a guitar that had…
George Harrison handed Jimmy Hendris a sitar and said, “This instrument took me three years to learn. You’ll never figure it out in one night.” 6 hours later, Jimmy played something that made George question everything he knew about music. It was November 1967, and London was in the middle of what everyone was calling…
Atlanta, Georgia, 1968. 15,000 fans packed into the municipal auditorium screaming for Jimmyi Hendris. The band was ready. The lights were set, but Jimmy wouldn’t walk on stage. His manager was panicking. The promoter was threatening to cancel, and Jimmy just stood backstage with his arms crossed, staring at the security guards, saying three words…
New York City, 1966. Jimmyi Hendris walked into Manny’s Music on 48th Street, the most famous guitar store in America. He was broke, unknown, and just wanted to try a Stratacastaster. The store employee took one look at him, a black guy with an afro holding the guitar upside down, and said, “That’s not how…
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