By Edward J. Boyer

We sat together on the small couch in her Los Angeles apartment on La Brea, upstairs next to the liquor store just off the corner of Venice Boulevard. She opened the file folder on her lap and handed me a page. When I finished reading the page, she took it back and handed me another. We continued that way until I finished the excerpt from the book she was writing.

That is how I met Lithofayne Pridgon, reading her passage on the enormously talented P-Funk guitarist Eddie Hazel, who called her Faye, and how he had used blood from the spike in his arm to write “I love U. F.P.” to her.

That was nearly two decades after her seven years with Jimi Hendrix in Harlem, where she was his “Foxy Lady” whose “obsession with freedom” and “addiction to young tenders” he could not overcome. Young tenders could only be her lovers until they started shaving or turned 21, “whichever comes first.”

She called her book in progress When Jimi Was Still Jimmy: The Harlem Years.

Anyone familiar with Jimi Hendrix’s bio knows her name. But she is so much more than her relationship with Hendrix. She was her own woman, her own person, and Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, James Brown, Otis Redding and Sly Stone were among the stars who found out. Little Willie John somehow always knew she was a free spirit and could not be possessed. Her lovers were a catalog of the brightest stars in the Black entertainment firmament of the 60s and 70s. And what stories she had to tell.

Fayne and her buddies were part of a 1960s “love generation” that “boldly embraced recreational sex,” she said. Her clique did not believe in limits, and “produced, directed and starred in our own orgies.” They were on “a first name basis with the staff at the free clinic. They even sent us Christmas cards.”

Her default position was, “Kiss my ass,” and she could unleash a stream of obscenities strong enough to demolish the strongest egos. Yet she could use those same words with affection, without even a hint of obscenity. She would rip into me for saying she had a gentle, compassionate core, but she did, and she showed it when she was “kissed on the ego.”

She had little patience for “suckers” who were too trusting, even though she said Hendrix suffered from that trait. But at her center, she was an artist —  an artist at living, at storytelling and at making and embracing the Blues. She always capitalized Blues, and her preference was for the sho nuff stomp down, back alley, gut bucket variety.

Lithofayne’s one-octave singing voice was no secret, she said, but Bobby “Blue” Bland still took her on the road once to sing backup. She said her singing was so bad he told her to “stand way back from the microphone and sing softly, while the other singers were instructed to sing louder and drown me out.”  Still, she wrote tunes most of her life. Atlantic Records chief Ahmet Ertegun personally recruited her to his label in the early 70s, and sent her to the iconic Muscle Shoals studios to record. But she was so dissatisfied with the result she would not give her permission to release the album.

Known to her friends as Fayne, Faye or Faytoe, Lithofayne was born with a congenital heart defect called ALCAPA (Anomalous Left Coronary Artery from the Pulmonary Artery), a condition occurring when the left coronary artery, which carries blood to the heart muscle, begins from the pulmonary artery instead of the aorta.

People born with that defect rarely made it out of their 30s, and it could only be diagnosed on a corpse until a diagnosis on living persons was developed just over a decade ago. Fayne learned then why she had been so easily fatigued for most of her life, and that her fatigue had a name.

She also learned that her heart’s ejection fraction constantly hovered in the range that produces what cardiologists call “catastrophic events.” The ejection fraction is the percentage of oxygenated blood the left ventricle pumps out when it contracts. The normal range is between roughly 52 and 75 percent. Fayne’s ejection fraction was in the teens.

“I’ve been given expiration dates more times than I can remember,” she often told me in the dozens of telephone conversations we had after she moved to a suburb of Las Vegas about 20 years ago.

But the expiration date did come on April 22, 2021. She was 80.

Fayne had allowed me to read excerpts from her chapter on Eddie Hazel back when her home-schooled daughter Magic was an honor student at the public high school she had recently entered, and before another daughter FiFi was incinerated in a fiery car crash on a Los Angeles freeway, leaving Lithofayne two granddaughters, Fantasi and Kharisma, to raise.

Andreé Penix Smith, an editor and mutual friend, had arranged for us to meet, telling Fayne I could help her organize and edit the mountain of material she had compiled for her Hendrix book. Bankers boxes sat against one wall in her apartment, filled with notebooks holding the journals Fayne had begun writing when she was 12 or 13 back in Moultrie, Georgia, her hometown. And she continued writing those journals through her years in New York and Los Angeles.

“How in hell else could I have remembered all of these details?” she once told me while giving a blow by blow account of a 1960s fistfight in the alley behind New York’s Palm Café.

Her family was from Moultrie’s across-the-tracks “dirty spoon” neighborhood, but they didn’t live down in “the bowl,” she said, chuckling. “We lived up on the handle.”

Her life had been peopled by colorful characters — Madam Lou Ida, who ran the busiest brothel in town, Dr. Buzzard, an infamous but respected conjurer and caster of spells, and her grandmother who counseled that all you need in life “are a few good White folks.”

She had been born with a caul, a piece of amniotic membrane covering her face — very powerful mojo, especially in the South where it was seen as an omen that could confer good fortune, metaphysical powers and the gift of seeing the spirit world. No matter how much she denied it, a stream of entertainers, like Eddie Hazel, showed up at her door, convinced that she had mystical powers that could enhance or restore their musical talent.

Willie John, whose recording of “Fever” gave Peggy Lee a career, took her to Harlem for the first time when she was 16. He was fond of smacking her on the butt and declaring: “This is good enough to hold church in.”

After she moved to Vegas, we continued talking and exchanging emails and text messages. She gradually began to soften, and began calling me her BTBN (By-the-book-Nigga). But showing affection? No, she preferred the needle. In one email she wrote:

Ed,  

     The only educated man I allow myself to associate with intentionally.

     Let’s talk when you find a bit of extra time (with your square ass). 

She developed enough trust to start sending me chapters. I even took the liberty of editing a single paragraph and emailing it to her:

Hey, Fayne,

     I’m still feeling you out, metaphorically that is. I’m sending you one paragraph I edited. If I accomplish anything in our conversations, I would like to convey to you the power of the declarative sentence. So I’ve edited this brief passage very lightly for clarity and flow. Who knows, we might find ourselves on the same page eventually.

 *

     Jimi grabbed the back of Ada Wilson’s  head , shoved her face in mine and said, “This is Faye, fuck-face. Say hi and be nice!” Ada, also known as Devon,  didn’t call him on his demeaning introduction, so I kept quiet, except to tell  him that we’d met. Her attempt to sit in the space she had created by making other revelers move  got a protest from Jimi, who was already three sheets to the wind.  “No, no, no, that’s for Faye!” Jimi said, and pulled me onto his lap.

I was pleased with her response:

     I keep meaning to remind you that I had to beg you (& damn near kiss your ass) to get you to be my friend again after you sulked for ages behind some dumb ass remarks I made. 

     Now on to the business at hand.  That sounds sooo perfect!  I love the way you simplify it all, yet say the exact same things I do. I’ve been diddling w/that paragraph for 2 days, and wound up putting it back like it was since nothing impressive came at me.  If nothing else, you’ve discovered I’m addicted to run-on sentences, parenthesis-a-plenty and unorthodox ways of getting a point across (maybe just plain old confusion).  You get an A+ for your persistence when it comes to attempts at normalizing me.  Fat chance!  

I responded:

My dear Lithofayne Faytoe,

     Correction. I never stopped being your friend. But sometimes a strategic retreat is necessary. From the time Ms. J. Andree Penix-Smith hooked us up, I have been absolutely captivated by your fascinating, unique personality. Your Eddie Hazel chapter cinched that. If I have any effect at all on your writing, it will be to get you to let your unique voice flow freely, clearly, effectively. Sometimes, it appears that you make too much of a conscious effort to accomplish that. You don’t need to. I would love to be able to get you to use the rich, visual voice I hear in our conversations in your writing. 

She sent more chapters, including an expanded one on Eddie Hazel and how writing about him re-ignited her desire to write about Hendrix.

            Eddie Hazel, was the necessary incentive for me to prove Jimi wasn’t a dope fiend. Jimi was never a drug addict. And believe me, I knew dope fiends (my life in New York was inundated with them). Jimi never physically nor mentally depended on narcotics to function, and did not shoot drugs the seven years I knew him, nor did I while he was alive. It would’ve taken a helluva camouflage (virtually nonexistent) to keep an addiction under wraps from me.”

She recalled in another chapter how she first met Hendrix “one day, on my way home from running an errand for my mother, when I folded under the weight of my built-in reluctance to follow instructions, and gave in to the temptation of an adventure detour.”

She stopped by one of  the “sets” sponsored by Fat Jack Taylor, a former drug kingpin turned legit, and stumbled in a darkened room and fell on a day bed.

She apologized “to the body I landed on.”

“It’s okay,” a raspy voice responded. “Are you hurt?”

“Nope! I had to save something for you to do,” she answered, “trying to
be witty. My clever quip (I thought) didn’t even get as much as a chuckle from the newbie.”

She asked his name. “Jimmy, the body answered as though it were a chore.”

“I’m Faye.”

“He didn’t care, at least not yet.”

Eventually, she took him home to meet Miss P, her “Georgia born, Blues fanatic mother.” Hendrix’s eyes zeroed in on Miss P’s vast record collection, a collection off limits to Fayne. With few exceptions, she wrote, “Jimi pulled out only stomp-down Blues. For him it was the gut-bucket find of a lifetime. I couldn’t believe my ears when Miss P gave Jimi permission to actually play some of the coveted, down-home, honey-dripping tunes.”

“Here and there, Jimi touched down to earth, but just long enough to question a delighted Miss P,” Fayne wrote in a chapter she called “Jimi: Blacks and Blues:”

     Bluesology 101 was now officially in session. On this day, thanks to Jimi, Blues tidbits would come before me that I’d never known, and I thought I knew it all. For example, a second Sonny Boy Williamson would come to my attention.

    “Do you know the name of this?” Jimi asked, nodding his head in the direction of the scratchy old illegible and unintelligible spinning record. To my amazement, she did (it was Robert Johnson) delighting Jimi with that and a whole bunch more that I never realized before then. 

Some Blues tunes took possession of Hendrix, and he once “set out on a mission to find Elmore James’ Anna Lee, a hard to come by favorite he had been trying to find for months,” Fayne wrote. “He was returning from pawning his guitar for rent money when he accidentally stumbled upon it on 125th Street. He bought it and several more with his pawn shop loan.”

“What about the rent, Jimi?”

“Fuck it.”

He used the money left over from his record store spending spree to buy her a “foxy” red dress. They were locked out of the apartment.

Still, there was the passion and the tension. She wrote about it in a chapter called “5^th Avenue”:

     Jimi’s incredible knack for making me feel responsible for, and guilty about his welfare defied explanation. At times he held me to blame if his head or stomach pained him, but it mostly coincided with [his] having been relegated to the position of sideman, playing music he didn’t want to play. I knew when he was vulnerable and needed extra emotional reinforcement, but it was hard focusing on canceling his feeling of abandonment and still make good on my threat to not live with him anymore.

     Even after he commenced his womanizing, and had skrillions of female alternatives, the excuse for his obsession with me was simply, “You’re just different. I can’t explain it.” Always saying no one could replace me; to which my response was always the same, “Well stop trying to replace me.”

     Anyone close [to me] knew how I felt about one’s right to do as they chose, without consequences, which made it even more absurd that Jimi took [my] ‘out-of-character’ jealousy spats seriously. My love for him was solid, if he had fifty women or none. I saw them come and go, and even brought him an occasional treat, especially one I didn’t mind partying with. Yet Jimi remained insanely jealous, never granting me anything close to the same options.

The 1973 Warner Bros. documentary Hendrix introduced Fayne to a public beyond the music business insiders who knew her so well. She was one of the most compelling voices in the film. Attention focused on Fayne even more intensely in the wake of Chris Campion’s excellent 2015 profile of her in The Guardian.

That profile brought Hollywood filmmakers and Random House publishers to her door. Random House, she said, offered her a deal. But they said they would assign a writer.

Assign a writer? No deal. She was the writer, and her book was her life’s work. Still, they departed on good terms, she said, and the door was left open for her to return.

The Hendrix Estate — she always called it the Hendrix Camp — connected her with Scott Silver, a screenwriter with an impressive list of credits, including 8 Mile. Silver became one of her “good White folks,” and she said he was interested in doing a film based on her story, not simply Hendrix’s.

Silver did everything he could to make it easier for her to write, she said. He sent housekeepers to clean her home, filled her refrigerator with food several times, shipped a new computer to her, retained a Beverly Hills lawyer for her and hired her granddaughters Fantasi and Kharisma as her assistants. But the deal hit a bump in the road, as she described in this February 2016 email:

Hey Genius, 

     Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but we must postpone our party.   I’m pumping the brakes again.  I met with the director (Paul Greengrass) & we hit it off.  He wants to go forward (September) but now the screenwriter wants my whole manuscript; that’s a dealbreaker.  At first it was two or three chapters. 

But the deal was not broken, and she maintained her contact with Silver. Still, delivering the material was a problem for her. She would work diligently on a chapter for days, only to tear it apart and rewrite it the next day. I would ask her about a passage only to have her say that it had changed, and a new version had been written. She did design a book cover, though, with a photo of her with Jimi, overlain by a hand-written love note from Jimi, reading in part:

     Darling, this is not from a book, movie or fairytale—this is straight from my heart. You may or you may not believe it, but you can rest assured that it’s true. Even if it doesn’t change your mind or feelings about anything, remember I love you no matter what your feelings may be.

She sent me at least a dozen versions of various chapters, even as her illness began taking a greater toll. We planned and canceled several trips to meet, but we never met face to face again after she moved to Vegas. I once asked that if she did not finish her book, what would happen to her journals and chapters after she died? Her son had told her that her papers should be donated to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame or to a university library. But her granddaughter Kharisma, who Fayne called a provocateur, told her she would burn all of the papers.

“And I don’t know if she was joking,” Fayne said.

It became increasingly clear to me that Fayne was not going to finish her book. She actually talked about doing three books from the memories she had stored in the bankers boxes and on at least six computers in her home. Those stories sustained her. She enjoyed telling them as much or more than writing about them.

But time was running out.

Our conversations became less frequent as 2020 gave way to 2021. She had had several health scares, and my calls, usually answered within no more than a day or two, would go weeks with no response. I texted her on March 29.

March 29,2021 1:03 PM

     Thinking about you, Fayne. Just touching base to say hello.

I was so relieved when she answered a couple of hours later:

March 29, 2021 3:35 PM

     Hi Ed.  Thanks for your howdy do.  I’m going through illnesses alphabetically (I believe).  Food poisoning is the latest ~few days ago~ recovering- from news.  Stay safe my friend! 

💚

And then silence. Three and a half weeks. And she was gone. ◼︎