3 Famous Black Veterans: Jimi Hendrix, Morgan Freeman & Shaggy

Before Jimi Hendrix graced the stage for an iconic performance at Woodstock, and before Morgan Freeman won an Academy Award, and before Orville Richard Burrell (aka Shaggy) earned his two Grammys was each artist’s U.S. military service. And in every case, the artist within the service member was bursting to get out.

James Marshall Hendrix, Jr., U.S. Army, 1961-1962. (Nov. 27, 1942-Sept. 18, 1970). Throughout the 71-page military service record of Seattle-born Jimi Hendrix, it is noted that he “plays guitar,” better, even, than the average person.

Prior to becoming widely acknowledged as one of history’s all-time greatest guitar players, Hendrix served as a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne Division. His motivation to enlist at age 19 was hardly altruistic: It was the future Woodstock sensation’s attempt to get right with the law.

Hendrix and the military didn’t quite mesh. After completing basic training at California’s Fort Ord, Pvt. Hendrix was stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where his middling performance as a soldier drew repeated rebukes from platoon leaders and commanders. One report filed on May 22, 1962, said Hendrix “has been found sleeping on duty several times” and “ his equipment has remained sub-standard.” Another report pointed to the possible reason why Hendrix was so tired: “Pvt Hendrix plays a musical instrument in a band off duty and has let this interfere with his military duties in so much as missing bed check and not getting enough sleep. He has no interest whatsoever in the Army.”

Indeed, according to a biography of the musician by Experience Hendrix, a family-run company, Hendrix spent much of his time at Fort Campbell playing in a band with Billy Cox, a Black Veteran and Hall of Fame bassist.

After Hendrix received a general discharge in 1962, according to Cox’s website, the two joined forces to play local dives in the South and Midwest on the “chitlin circuit,” which was a group of entertainment venues frequented by Black Americans during the Jim Crow era of segregation. Hendrix and Cox eventually formed The King Kasuals Band in Nashville, Cox noted.

Within three years of leaving the military, according to Hendrix’s biography, he’d played with marquee Black musical talents such as Tina and Ike Turner, Little Richard and Sam Cooke, until eventually forming his band, Jimmy James and the Blue Flames.

That Hendrix’s grinding and ethereal guitar performance of the “The Star-Spangled Banner” in 1969 at the Woodstock Music & Art Fair would spark questions about his patriotism one year before his early death at age 28 is maybe the least surprising aspect of Hendrix’s remarkable, too-short life.

Learn more

Review: Jimi Hendrix’s medical records, https://www.scribd.com/doc/69746653/Jimi-Hendrix-Medical-Records

Listen: “Two hours of Jimi Hendrix on World Café,” https://www.npr.org/2013/03/22/175042074/two-hours-of-jimi-hendrix-on-world-cafe

Watch: Jimi Hendrix plays the national anthem at Woodstock, 1969: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3-b3ViNTMI

Read: Hendrix biography, https://www.jimihendrix.com/biography

Read: Cox’s biography, http://www.bassistbillycox.com/biography2.html

Morgan Porterfield Freeman, Jr., U.S. Air Force, 1955-1959. (June 1, 1937-). Long before earning an Oscar nomination for his performance in the 1989 film “Driving Miss Daisy” and taking home the supporting actor statue in 2014 for “Million Dollar Baby,” Memphis-born Freeman was dreaming of becoming a jet fighter.

His infatuation with fighter pilots came from watching war movies as a kid growing up in Charleston, Mississippi, where he was sent to live with his grandparents.

“I went to the movies all the time,” Freeman recalled in a 2015 interview with the Oxford Union. “I pretty much lived in the movies.”

“I went into the Air Force because I really did want to fly, and it was the quickest ticket out of Mississippi to elsewhere in the world,” he said. “And I learned very quickly that that wasn’t going to happen; I was not going to be a jet pilot and I was not cut out for the military.”

“I learned a lot while I was in the military,” he said. But the dangerous reality the fighter pilot life set in when Freeman sat in the cockpit of a T-33 jet trainer at Naval Air Station North Island in Coronado, California. Looking up through the glass canopy and then surveying the instruments, “that’s when I decided acting was going to be it,” Morgan said, as the audience chuckled.

Nevertheless, Morgan spent three years in Air Force radar maintenance until his departure at the rank of airman first class. All but one of his five brothers served in the military, and one died while serving with the Marine Corps at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, according to the website, TogetherWeServed.com.

Learn more

Watch: Morgan Freeman Q&A with the Oxford Union, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFKlbYeXBQ8

Review: Morgan Freeman’s Together We Served page, https://airforce.togetherweserved.com/usaf/servlet/tws.webapp.WebApp?cmd=ShadowBoxProfile&type=Person&ID=119477

Orville Richard Burrell, U.S. Marine Corps, 1988-1992. (Oct. 22, 1968-). Growing up in Jamaica, Burrell told an interviewer, he was a skinny boy with a lot of hair. The look earned him the nickname “Shaggy,” a reference to the cartoon character in the “Scooby-Doo” TV show.

After immigrating to Brooklyn in his teens — well before he became Shaggy, the two-time Grammy award-winning reggae artist, rapper and pop star — Burrell struggled to support himself with music. “And I really needed to get off the streets,” he said in a 2019 video recorded for Veterans Day.

Burrell saw the Marine Corps as a way to earn a living and avoid the criminal justice system. “I was with a lot of people I shouldn’t be with, and the military changed my life,” he said.

Burrell served in the 5th Battalion, 10th Marines as field artillery cannon crewman. In 1991, after three years on active duty, he deployed to Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm.

“It’s funny how … whatever training that you have gotten imitates what life is about,” the artist told WCVB Channel 5 Boston in a Nov. 7, 2019, interview on being honored at a Veterans Day dinner hosted by the organization Home Base. “It was preparing me for what was to be the rest of my life, and my career.”

In addition to winning two Grammys — in 1996 for “Boombastic,” and in 2019 for “44/876,” a collaboration with Sting — Shaggy’s 2000 album “Hot Shot” went platinum “six times over,” according to Rolling Stone.

Review: Orville Richard Burrell’s Together We Served page, https://blog.togetherweserved.com/2021/04/01/orville-richard-burrell-aka-shaggy-u-s-marine-corps-1988-1992

Watch: “Shaggy honored at Home Base Veterans Day dinner,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRFy235Ma94