I was having a discussion with my son, Phillip, and our conversation turned to the public attention around Jimi Hendrix, the rock superstar who sang openly about depression.

He died in September 1970. It has been 56 years since his death, and somehow, he matters as much today as he did when he was alive.

What is that all about? How does a man who left the world at 27 still feel like he’s speaking directly to us — not from a poster, not from a myth, but from the ache inside his music?

Maybe it’s because Hendrix wasn’t just a guitarist. He was a wounded kid from Seattle who carried a broom as a substitute for the guitar he didn’t have.

And when the broom wore out, he graduated to a onestring ukulele someone handed him — a tiny, battered thing he coaxed melodies from.

Eventually he found his first $5 acoustic guitar, bought fourthhand, the kind of instrument most kids would have abandoned.

But Hendrix didn’t abandon anything. He made music out of whatever the world gave him.

He was a young man who learned early that loneliness has a sound, and that if you play it honestly enough, people will hear their own lives inside it.

The myth says Hendrix arrived fully formed — a psychedelic comet streaking across the sky. But the truth is quieter, more human.

His parents struggled with alcoholism. His siblings were scattered by the state. His childhood was a patchwork of neglect, sorrow, and improvisation.

Mark Twain would have recognized him instantly: a kid rehearsing his future with whatever scraps the world left him.

When he finally left America for the United Kingdom, he didn’t go chasing fame. He went chasing belonging.

He played the Chitlin’ Circuit, slept in cheap rooms, and tried to break through in a country where radio stations were divided by race like two sides of a river that refused to meet.

Too black for white radio. Too white for black radio. Too strange for the industry. Too brilliant for the box they tried to put him in.

And in London, Hendrix found what every lonely kid hopes for: someone who sees them. Within three days — three days — he was playing with Eric Clapton.

Maybe Hendrix’s newfound luck was a cosmic clerical error: He wanders into the wrong pub and accidentally becomes a star.

But even as the world embraced him, depression followed him like a shadow. He spoke openly about it — a rare thing for a man in the 1960s, rarer still for a black man in a country that didn’t want to hear about black pain unless it came with a melody.

Tens of thousands of young people listened to him for hope because he played the way they felt: raw, restless, lonely and reaching.

I did.

When Hendrix returned to Seattle in 1968 as a superstar, he walked into Garfield High School — his old school — and was heckled.

Imagine that. The most famous person ever to walk those halls, and the students didn’t know what to do with him.

Some thought he was too white. Some thought he was too strange. Some thought he had abandoned them.

Race was a seething open wound in America then, and Hendrix was caught in the middle of it.

He was tormented by that moment for the rest of his life.

And yet, he kept playing. Kept bending notes into prayers. Kept turning loneliness into electricity. Kept giving young people a place to put their sorrow.

Fifty-six years later, Seattle finally built a park for him. A park. Not an airport, not a boulevard, not a museum — a park.

The late Charles R. Cross, a Seattle journalist who had written about Hendrix, liked to say Seattle names streets after professional athletes who retire within three months, but it took a half-century to honor Hendrix.

Maybe that’s fitting. Maybe cities, like people, take time to understand the ones who were ahead of them.

What stays with me now is not the myth — the wild hair, the psychedelic clothes, the guitar set on fire.

What stays with me is the boy with the broom. The kid with the one-string ukulele. The kid with the $5 guitar.

The child who practiced his future in a house full of sorrow. The child who turned loneliness into art so powerful that it still echoes through today’s population, regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, education or social class.

Hendrix’s legacy isn’t just the music. It’s the message beneath the music:

You can be lonely and still make something beautiful.

You can be wounded and still change the world.

You can be misunderstood and still matter.

His art was disruptive, yes — but not because of the volume or the distortion.

It was disruptive because it told the truth. It carried boundaries, vulnerability, and the raw energy of a man who refused to hide his pain.

And in doing so, he gave millions of young people permission to feel their own.

If we honor Hendrix, let’s honor all of him — the genius and the ache, the brilliance and the depression, the boy with the broom and the man with the burning guitar.

Let’s honor the way he turned isolation into inspiration, the way he made suffering sound like hope, the way he taught us that originality is sometimes born from the places we least want to revisit.

And maybe, in remembering him without varnish, we can remember something about ourselves, too:

That art is often made by the lonely.

That beauty often comes from the broken.

And that sometimes the broom you carry as a child becomes the instrument that lights the world.