Voices from the Past

Jimi Hendrix at home, Brook Street, London, 1969. Photo by Barrie Wentzell.

This week, Jimi Hendrix charted a Top Five album, when the new posthumous album Valleys Of Neptune entered the Billboard Top 200 at #4. It's been 40 years since Jimi died at just shy of his 28th birthday. Nobody else has ever had an album in the Top Five so long after their death. Elvis Presley was the previous record-holder with an album that charted 26 years after he died. It's Jimi's third posthumous Top Five album, and it dragged no fewer than three other Hendrix albums into the current Billboard 200 with it.

There was some revising of history going on in photography, too. This week, the Associated Press is re-captioning a 68-year-old photograph. For many years, the picture above was believed to show the infamous Bataan Death March in the Phillipines. But an 87-year-old veteran, John E. Love of Albuquerque, N.M., remembered it differently. He believed it showed a burial detail in the weeks that followed the march itself; he knew, because he was there.

His memories eventually led to a months-long investigation by the AP, which eventually made the very unusual decision to revise the picture's caption, 65 years after the photo and caption were first released and 68 years after the event it depicts. The original picture is now in the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

The story is on the wire, including here on MSNBC.

Mike
(Thanks to Bill Mitchell)

Send this post to a friend

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Comments

[Dick Bolton]

So, the AP is correcting a photo caption 65 years after the photo's original release ...

Good for AP. Dedication to accuracy is the cornerstone of good journalism, including photojournalism.

[Paul]

I am a total and utter Jimi Hendrix fanatic, I was born 2 years after his death and the moment I first heard his music aged 12 it must of been the most influential happening in my whole artistic life. He was one hell of a creative guy who seemed to work full throtle in the Right hemisphere of the brain.

[yunfat]

I love Jimmy. His best album is live: Band of Gypsies. None of his other work even comes close (probably because of the black rhythm section, sorry Mitch Mitchell... "The Experience" held Jimi back, at least in my humble opinion).

It's the greatest musical performance of all time. No one will touch it, ever. Yep, I said it.

I met someone who went to the concert in 1969, he told me that for him and his friends, the concert was "life-changing". Met a second person who went, unrelated to the first, who said EXACTLY the same thing.

Crank it and believe, Jimi was a God.

[F.M.]

Being Filipino (and history nut), and currently listening to Valleys of Neptune (for the past two weeks now), this post has a lot of relevance to me. As a pro guitarist the album has me mesmerized. As a Filipino, it's good to see that our history isn't forgotten and still updated (up to date history?). Particularly since my granddad was there at the Bataan Death March.

Not much point to my ramblings. Just wanted to point out my connection to the post...

[Mike Johnston]

I'm glad you did F.M., because I'm not sure if I've ever heard from a reader in the Phillipines before. Glad to know you are reading the site.

Mike

[MJFerron]

There was only one Jimmy. His guitar had a sound of its own. I've always wondered if he had reached peak or was there still more to give?

[Martin Doonan]

The Bataan story is rather sobering and, rather shamefully, I had to go look it up (although it is less well known in the UK, I think).
Timely update to the story, too. April 9th is a national holiday here in the Phillipines to commemorate the event (known as Day of Valour or Bataan Day). That date was the date of the surrender of US forces that led to the march.

[JonA]

Mike,
I know you like well-respected but maybe underground music. Did you see that Alex Chilton passed away? I know very little about him or his music but he was very influential on a lot of musicians who followed him and they also tended to be well-respected but a bit underground.

[Dean Johnston]

Hi there!

Just went down to the local store, in Mother's town where I'm on holiday, to buy the aforementioned Jimi Hendrix album, and while there I checked out the cookbook section.

As a former chef-type person, one thing I noticed was that they seem to be more about photography than cooking. In many (most?) cases I decided the photography was more successful than I suspect the recipes would be. One book in fact seemed to consist mostly of wistful young girls glancing back over their shoulders while strolling through English garden idylls, rather than of recipes.

Right, better go and listen to this new album then, seeing as it is the tenuous link for writing about cookbook photography...