When "Axis: Bold As Love" came out, the coolest black guy in my high school said to me, "You do realize that Jimi Hendrix is the Second Coming, don't you?" He was dead serious.
I mumbled something noncommittal, and he said, pityingly, "I really thought you were smart enough to see the truth." (The same guy also explained to me when Vanilla Fudge's first single was on the radio that he knew that the band must be black. "Listen to those drums, man!")
Hendrix was a competent, journeyman R&B player when he was backing Curtis Knight, etc.---but he didn't have anything like a truly original style in his early career. Eric Clapton more or less invented the role of the virtuoso lead guitarist by stealing every lick he could from John Mayall's gigantic collection of blues records and using what he'd learned to create the first unmistakably original rock style.
Hendrix undoubtedly could have done the same thing, but he never took the monk-like approach Clapton did to studying all the master bluesmen---anyway, he was too busy working.
If there's one aspect of Hendrix's career that qualifies him as the greatest rock something, if not the greatest rock guitarist, it's that he was the first---and still the only---black American musician to turn the tables on all of the British rock bands who had ripped off American blues musicians when he ripped off Cream, the Yardbirds, etc., beating them at their own game. Ginger Baker, that bitter old man, is still furious about Chas Chandler waiting for Cream to go off on a U.S. tour and then booking Hendrix as a substitute into all of the venues in the UK and Europe where Cream had been playing (he says, "Jimi was nothing like as good as Eric, Noel was no Jack, and Mitch wasn't as good as me!").
