#lithofayne pridgon

[classicladiesofcolor]

She is probably best known as friend, confidant--and in some cases, girlfriend--to legends like James Brown, Little Willie John, Sam Cooke, and perhaps most notably, Jimi Hendrix (it is believed that several Hendrix songs are about her, including “Foxy Lady”). She was also Etta James’ best friend. 

However, Lithofayne Pridgon is also a singer/songwriter. You can hear some of her recordings on YouTube (link below).

YouTube Channel All photos from The Guardian (“Lithofayne Pridgon: Jimi Hendrix’s original ‘foxy lady’”).

[weirdtvland]

Jimi Hendrix & Lithofayne Pridgon with their friends, The Allen Twins (1967).

[ddivorceddad]

Relatable lore

[strictlyfavorites]

Lithofayne Pridgon Jimi Hendrix’s original foxy lady1

She was the woman he could never quite date exclusively, because she was too free spirited to be tied to one man; Hendrix’s frustration at loving her alongside singers Sam Cooke and Little Willie John inspired “Foxy Lady.”

It was the 1960s, and Pridgon was dating both Little Willie John and Cooke while running with other musicians, hustlers, drug dealers and, later, “fun fun cops” who shook down people to bring her the leftover pharmaceuticals. At a party in 1962 thrown by Jack “Fat Man” Taylor, a big Harlem drug player, she met Jimi Hendrix, a struggling guitarist.  She and Hendrix had a one-night stand of sorts at Fat Man’s party and then ran into each other again outside of the Apollo one year later; Pridgon was there to see Cooke, and Hendrix was trying to get a job. But in that moment, the two began their torrid and frustrating love affair—while she was still seeing Willie John and Cooke, of course.

But Jimi, she says, so young and in love, was also “insanely jealous”. She has an extraordinary collection of love letters from him, written in florid, lyrical prose – the same style later evident in his lyrics – that prove without a shadow of a doubt the intensity of his infatuation; an intensity that scared her. “As I write more and more, I feel myself grow so very weak under the power of you,” he wrote in one.

For all her talk of being a “loose lady”, Lithofayne is clearly a romantic at heart; one who sought from the men she knew a love that was pure and uncomplicated by jealousy, disaffection and possessiveness; a love that swept her off her feet, but also a love that left her to be free. “I wanted to continue seeing Jackie and Sam and Willie,” she says. “I didn’t think about it in terms of, ‘I’m your old lady.’ I wasn’t anybody’s old lady.” She loved them all equally and unreservedly. “That was the problem,” she says. Jimi couldn’t handle that.

“He adored her, to the point of distraction,” Winona Williams says of Hendrix. “You always want what you can’t have. And he had her but he didn’t have her exclusively, and that drove him up the wall.”

One time Lithofayne recalls, he even said to her, albeit jokingly: “I’d like to freeze you in a cake of ice, thaw you out when I want to, if that was possible, huh?” “Stop talkin’, crazy,” she replied. “He talked crazy.”

Hendrix left the US in September 1966 for England, where he would find a recording contract, recognition and fame. But he made a point of tracking Lithofayne down whenever he came back to New York, and she remained very much on his mind. His deep, abiding love for her never faltered, seemingly finding form in a song he recorded in London for his debut album, “Foxy Lady”.

She tells a story that illuminates where the title may have come from. “He used to call every pet we had ‘Foxy’,” she says. One time, they found a kitten on the street and took it in; Jimi immediately named it Foxy. Later on, they bought a poodle; he named that Foxy, too. He was also in the habit of using the word in other ways: “He used to like to refer to good-looking girls as foxy. Or if I put on certain things, he’d say, ‘Wow, you look foxy in that.’”

So wrapped up was she in her own story with Jimi, she never thought for a minute the songs with which he found fame could be about her. She thinks it would make her sound “cocky” if she claimed they were now. “He was always saying: ‘This is about you. I wrote this about you,’” she says. “I just thought it was cute.”

“Jimi would have settled down with Fayne,” says Williams. “I don’t see any other woman that he’d have settled down with – but Fayne was not about to settle down. If Fayne had said: ‘Look, I want you to leave all of these women alone and we’re going to do this,’ he would have done it.”

“Well, he might have,” Lithofayne laughs, “but that would have been dumb.”

Williams is adamant that Lithofayne, the only constant in his life from the time he first hit New York in 1963 through the seven years until he died, was the one person among his circle of intimates who superseded all others. “All of these girls that think they had a part of this man’s heart need to know that his whole heart belonged to Lithofayne Pridgon,” she says. “But he couldn’t get it.” 

Her time with Hendrix, in particular, weighs heavily on her, sometimes too heavily. Over the years, friends and acquaintances have suggested things might have turned out different if only she had acceded to his demands. “In other words, if I had stopped being me and become somebody else,” she says. “Oh my God, that’s too much responsibility.” But she believes in her heart that “‘ole coulda-shoulda-woulda shit” is just a losing game.

[groupiesoutrageously]

Lithofayne Pridgon and Jimi Hendrix, c. 1970

[twixnmix]

Lithofayne Pridgon: Jimi Hendrix’s original ‘foxy lady’

She was the woman he could never quite date exclusively, because she was too free spirited to be tied to one man; Hendrix's frustration at loving her alongside singers Sam Cooke and Little Willie John inspired "Foxy Lady."

It was the 1960s, and Pridgon was dating both Little Willie John and Cooke while running with other musicians, hustlers, drug dealers and, later, "fun fun cops" who shook down people to bring her the leftover pharmaceuticals. At a party in 1962 thrown by Jack "Fat Man" Taylor, a big Harlem drug player, she met Jimi Hendrix, a struggling guitarist.  She and Hendrix had a one-night stand of sorts at Fat Man's party and then ran into each other again outside of the Apollo one year later; Pridgon was there to see Cooke, and Hendrix was trying to get a job. But in that moment, the two began their torrid and frustrating love affair—while she was still seeing Willie John and Cooke, of course.

But Jimi, she says, so young and in love, was also “insanely jealous”. She has an extraordinary collection of love letters from him, written in florid, lyrical prose – the same style later evident in his lyrics – that prove without a shadow of a doubt the intensity of his infatuation; an intensity that scared her. “As I write more and more, I feel myself grow so very weak under the power of you,” he wrote in one.

For all her talk of being a “loose lady”, Lithofayne is clearly a romantic at heart; one who sought from the men she knew a love that was pure and uncomplicated by jealousy, disaffection and possessiveness; a love that swept her off her feet, but also a love that left her to be free. “I wanted to continue seeing Jackie and Sam and Willie,” she says. “I didn’t think about it in terms of, ‘I’m your old lady.’ I wasn’t anybody’s old lady.” She loved them all equally and unreservedly. “That was the problem,” she says. Jimi couldn’t handle that.

“He adored her, to the point of distraction,” Winona Williams says of Hendrix. “You always want what you can’t have. And he had her but he didn’t have her exclusively, and that drove him up the wall.”

One time Lithofayne recalls, he even said to her, albeit jokingly: “I’d like to freeze you in a cake of ice, thaw you out when I want to, if that was possible, huh?” “Stop talkin’, crazy,” she replied. “He talked crazy.”

Hendrix left the US in September 1966 for England, where he would find a recording contract, recognition and fame. But he made a point of tracking Lithofayne down whenever he came back to New York, and she remained very much on his mind. His deep, abiding love for her never faltered, seemingly finding form in a song he recorded in London for his debut album, “Foxy Lady”.

She tells a story that illuminates where the title may have come from. “He used to call every pet we had ‘Foxy’,” she says. One time, they found a kitten on the street and took it in; Jimi immediately named it Foxy. Later on, they bought a poodle; he named that Foxy, too. He was also in the habit of using the word in other ways: “He used to like to refer to good-looking girls as foxy. Or if I put on certain things, he’d say, ‘Wow, you look foxy in that.’”

So wrapped up was she in her own story with Jimi, she never thought for a minute the songs with which he found fame could be about her. She thinks it would make her sound “cocky” if she claimed they were now. “He was always saying: ‘This is about you. I wrote this about you,’” she says. “I just thought it was cute.”

“Jimi would have settled down with Fayne,” says Williams. “I don’t see any other woman that he’d have settled down with – but Fayne was not about to settle down. If Fayne had said: ‘Look, I want you to leave all of these women alone and we’re going to do this,’ he would have done it.”

“Well, he might have,” Lithofayne laughs, “but that would have been dumb.”

Williams is adamant that Lithofayne, the only constant in his life from the time he first hit New York in 1963 through the seven years until he died, was the one person among his circle of intimates who superseded all others. “All of these girls that think they had a part of this man’s heart need to know that his whole heart belonged to Lithofayne Pridgon,” she says. “But he couldn’t get it.” 

Her time with Hendrix, in particular, weighs heavily on her, sometimes too heavily. Over the years, friends and acquaintances have suggested things might have turned out different if only she had acceded to his demands. “In other words, if I had stopped being me and become somebody else,” she says. “Oh my God, that’s too much responsibility.” But she believes in her heart that “‘ole coulda-shoulda-woulda shit” is just a losing game.

(Read the full article via The Guardian)

[gingerylangylang1979]

Two of his Lithofayne Pridgon and Devon Wilson are black women with amazing stories that inspired two of his songs. They would be great characters. But knowing Hollywood they would only focus on the white women he was with. Sorry, I'm still burned from Chevalier.

fantastic article by kyndall cunningham for vox 🕺

young non-white actors just do not get the same hype as the likes of timothée chalamet or austin butler and it shows.

[rock-n-roll-redux]

Lithofayne Pridgon: Jimi hendrix’s original ‘Foxy Lady’. She was the woman he could never quite date exclusively, because she was too free spirited to be tied to one man; Hendrix’s frustration at loving her alongside singers Sam Cooke and Little Willie John inspired “Foxy Lady.”

(Read the full article via The Guardian) https://www.theguardian.com/…/lithofayne-pridgon-jimi-hendr…

[weirdtvland]

Lithofayne Pridgon sometime in the early seventies.

[kickmag]

Throwback: The Jimi Hendrix Experience-Foxy Lady

The Jimi Hendrix Experience came from Jimi Hendrix's years of being a supporting and session musician for others including The Isley Brothers, Little Richard, Sam Cooke and Ike and Tina Turner. Chas Chandler, who managed English rock group The Animals, took Hendrix to England to start a solo career. Hendrix, Noel Redding (bass) and Mitch Mitchell (drums) became The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Are You Experienced? was their 1967 debut album. "Foxy Lady" was rumored to be inspired by Hendrix's Harlem girlfriend Lithofayne "Faye" Pridgon and it was all about Hendrix aggressively approaching women walking down the street although he was actually shy in his daily life. Hendrix's sultry guitar riffs and bold vocals jolted rock audiences into full attention on the new rock trio. "Foxy Lady" fully represented Hendrix's style that drew from R&B, blues and jazz with his individual psychedelic imprint. Are You Experienced? opened up new possibilities in music for the way Hendrix and his band finessed the blues into transcendental euphoria. The Hendrix-penned "Foxy Lady" was amongst his signature songs that became synonymous with the '60s and one of rock's lasting creations beyond its original time. 

[unit85and86roisinsillitoe]

Task 4 - Final Piece

[Behance link]

I made a groupie-related zine, Valley Of The Dolls, as my final piece idea.

As it primarily focused on the 1960s and 1970s, I opened Coolors and searched for psychedelic palettes. I didn’t want the colours to be too acidic and bright, but I also wanted them to stand out. The 1960s focused more on pastels - mint, baby pink, baby blue - while the 1970s focused more on bright tones - mustard yellow, burnt orange, deep red, and denim blue. I used the Psychedelic Sunrise palette for the majority of the work, and took all my colours from Coolors.

COVER

For the cover of the zine I wanted it to be simple while hinting at the content inside. I chose a photo of a young Beatles fan in 1968 from Pinterest for the cover, as I liked the layout of the photo, and the model had a suitably doe-eyed groupie look. I opened it in Photoshop, and created a gradient with a hot pink at one end and a deeper purple at the other. I then went to Layer > New Fill Layer > Gradient and filled the image with my gradient. I set the layer’s Blending Mode to Darken so the gradient would shine through instead of turning dark on the black and white of the image. I then brightened the image with Adjustment layers such as Brightness/Contrast and Curves to increase its visibility. After making sure the image was sharpened, I started on the text. I used Cooper Black for my title as I thought it looked sufficiently ‘retro’ while still being readable. I decided to give my text a gradient effect as well, but in a more unconventional way. I selected a bright orange as my starter colour, and then duplicated the layers a few times. For each new row of text, I selected a lighter shade. I then positioned my title, rasterised the layers, flattened the layers, and centered them.

PAGE 1/PAGE 2

For page 1 and 2, I decided to focus on Pamela Des Barres, the most infamous groupie of the scene. I wanted to make her pages light and very 60s, as she was active during the late 60s groupie scene in Los Angeles. I chose a sugary pink background for her pages, and I typed the page titles in Bauhaus 93 font. I wanted to jazz the pages up a little, so after rasterising the ‘Pamela’, I selected it with the Magic Wand Tool and inversed the selection. On a new layer, I filled the area above the word with a golden brown. For the photo of Pamela, I chose an image from a photoshoot of her in the late 70s. I chose that one specifically because I liked the composition and it was easy to build text around. After cutting it out with the Pen Tool, I resized the image and made it completely black and white with the use of a Gradient map. To colour the background, I made a pink to black gradient and placed it under the text. I chose a quote from her that I thought highlighted the overall groupie ethos of ‘music is life.’ I capitalised a few of the letters in the sentences to make it look a little more ‘jagged’, and I drew white boxes around the text with the Polygonal Lasso Tool.

For the second page, I followed the exact same formula of the first. I selected a picture of Pamela that was taken in the late 60s, and is probably one of the most well-known photos of her. I cut it out with the Pen Tool, and placed it so that her left leg would be on page one. I added a short biography of her on page two, next to the cutout.

PAGE 3/PAGE 4

For pages 3 and 4, I decided on ‘baby groupie’ Lori Mattix as my subject. I thought Lori would be an interesting choice as she started in the groupie scene very young (14), and had a few comments on the more negative side of the scene. I chose a pale blue for her background to emphasise the fact that she was young, and kept the same pale pink from Pamela’s page for her text. I used a sans-serif font for her title. To make it just an outline, I typed out and arranged the titles. I then selected them all using shift + the Magic Wand Tool before turning off their visibility. I went to Blending Options, and gave all the selections a stroke of 3 or 4. I then selected off, and rasterised the type. I chose a photo of Lori from the mid-70s, with model Shray Mecham in the background. I used a black and white gradient map, brightened the photo a little, and then put it under the text.

For the second page, I found a photo of Lori from the 70s. I resized it to fit the whole page, and covered the top half of her face with a black box. I used the Rectangular Marquee tool to do that. I then added a short biography, in the same style of Pamela’s page, and created a speech bubble with the Lasso Tool coming from her mouth. I coloured the main bubble white and the tail pink. I then added a quote, and sharpened the final image.

PAGE 5/PAGE 6

For Jenny Kee’s pages, I decided to go for a more psychedelic and arty style. Kee is a lesser-known Australian-Chinese groupie who found worldwide fame as a fashion designer, but as a youth she was active in the Swinging London scene of the 60s. I found a black and white photo of Kee posing in front of an elaborate design of fabric and bric-a-brac, and created a new Gradient Fill layer. I used bright red and orange for my gradient, and set it to Multiply. For her title, I used a font I really like called Flowers Kingdom. I typed ‘MISS JENNY KEE’ as one word on three separate layers. I went to Type > Warp Text and used the Rise setting at +23. I copied this at various degrees for the other two text layers.

For page 6, I copied the pop art style of the 60s to make the image. I found another photo of Kee and resized it to fit the entire page. I then went to Filter > Color Halftone, and set a halftone at the lowest setting on the image. I then added a black and white gradient map, before adding a black border on a separate layer with the Rectangular Marquee Tool. To place the text, I again used the Rectangular Marquee Tool + Shift to create a square. I positioned it slightly to the left, centering it, and filling it with the same orange from the gradient. I them typed a speech mark and resized it to make it large, colouring it with the same red from the gradient. I then duplicated the speech mark and rotated it 180 degrees, positioning it at the bottom right of the square. I used the Text Tool to make a textbox, adding in a quote from Kee. I set the orange box to Multiply, and the commas to Multiply.

PAGE 7/PAGE 8

For page 7 and 8, I centered on Lithofayne Pridgon, the woman who allegedly inspired Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Foxy Lady’. I wanted to keep her pages really simple. I found a photo of Pridgon and resized it to fit the page with the ‘Show Transform Controls’ tool. I then went to the Adjustments panel and used a Gradient Map to increase the shades of the image, and a Levels layer to adjust the contrast of the image. I used a Colour Fill layer with a dark mint green tone, and set it to darken. For her title, I used a font named Dollie Script and set it to a coral orange. I rotated it a little with the Show Transform Controls tool.

For page 8, I used a still from a video of Pridgon. I went to the Adjustments panel and used a Brightness/Contrast layer to make the image brighter. I then used a Gradient Map in black and white to desaturate the image. I filled a layer with the same coral orange colour and set it to Darken in the Blending Modes of the image. For her quote, I created a textbox and added the text. I also seperated the distance between each line. I turned the text a dark gold colour, and on a new layer, I made a box around the text in pale pink. I then used the Rectangular Marquee tool to clear the box until it ‘highlighted’ the text. I then centered everything.

BACK COVER

The back cover was a direct response to the simplicity of the front cover. I found three images through Pinterest, and positioned them on top of each other. For the torn pages effect, I downloaded a pack of brushes that had a ‘ripped paper’ effect, and resized them. I then painted the brushes on seperate layers at the joins of the photos. I then used the Eraser Tool and a layer mask to erase the parts of the image and brush that overlapped, leaving a neat tear on each image. I then went to Filter > Noise > Add Noise, and added some grain over the images. The quote of the back cover is a David Bowie quote, written in the font Royal Acidbath. I used a textbox to spread the text all over, and made it as large as I could.

EVALUATION

My zine took major inspiration from Andy Warhol’s pop art pieces - bright colours, bold text, and maximalism, as well as halftone effects. I think that this was a good project to push myself on, as I had to condense a lot of history into a small zine and a few quotes, as well as getting the vibe of the zine across. I’m disappointed in myself for not using materials I bought, such as textured paper, in my final zine, but overall I really like the piece and I’m really happy with how it came out.

[legacymusicstarts]

Tweeted

Lithofayne Pridgon: Jimi Hendrix’s original ‘foxy lady’ https://t.co/BuQ5TH0EUn http://pic.twitter.com/LujF9lXGws

— Achieve This (@AchieveThis) April 1, 2017

[megarockradio]

JIMI HENDRIX's Original "Foxy Lady" LITHOFAYNE PRIDGON Has Passed Away

JIMI HENDRIX’s Original “Foxy Lady” LITHOFAYNE PRIDGON Has Passed Away

Jimi Hendrix‘s Original “Foxy Lady” LITHOFAYNE PRIDGON Has Passed Away JIMI HENDRIX’s Original “Foxy Lady” LITHOFAYNE PRIDGON Has Passed Away Read this article at Classic Rock Magazine!

[weirdtvland]

My favorite rock couple! Idc I love them together even though they weren't really together.

[brownskinsugarplum76]

Miss Fayne! 👑❤️

“There were so many groupies that I idolized. The one that I think was the best was Fayne Pridgon. She was Sam Cooke’s girlfriend. She introduced Sam Cooke to Jimi Hendrix. Then she was Jimi Hendrix’s girlfriend.” –Miss Mercy