The Stranger

Dear Hendrix

Eva Walker — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 15:00:00 -0800

There is nothing like the love you get from a grandparent. by Eva Walker

Dear Hendrix,

I was one of the lucky ones. Growing up, my grandparents were in my life in a major way, and I don't know where I would be today without them. It's a funny thing—so often we're taught that success means to move away from your family and start your own life, your own family. But for me, success means being able to talk, learn, and live with my mother's parents, Gramsy and Poppie. And though they're no longer here with us, I think about them often. I miss them dearly. So, I wanted to take a moment here to tell you a bit about them. And their dentures.

Back in the 1900s, when I was a teenager, Gramsy, Poppie, and I were sitting at the dining room table in our family home, the home my mother (your grandma) still lives in today. They were done with their dinner, but I was just about to dig into mine. What was on the menu? Gramsey's gumbo! Both Gramsy and Poppie are from New Orleans, so while we lived 2,600 miles from the Crescent City, its cuisine was still a daily staple.

As I licked my chops and picked up my spoon, Poppie started to talk to me about teeth. Specifically, his dentures.

In old-school fashion, Poppie and Gramsy always cleaned their dentures after a meal—that wasn’t a rare sight. But that evening, they decided it was time I get a lesson in denture homecare. I sat there, spoon in hand, warm steam from the bowl of gumbo wafting up to my face, when Poppie took out his teeth and started to explain how he went about cleaning his removable pearly whites. An engineer by trade, Poppie, who moved up to Seattle in 1968 when there were no professional opportunities for him in the South, got a job at Boeing. It’s because of that job that you’re in Seattle today. And, seeing as how he’s an engineer,you can imagine how meticulous he was about his denture cleaning.

This was not something at all I wanted to watch while I was eating—especially when sitting down to a messy dish like gumbo. But somehow I couldn’t look away, I listened intently and stared. I was fascinated by just about everything my grandparents told me. I wanted to soak up all their knowledge every chance I got and I guess that included their denture routine, strange as that might sound. After all, I might have dentures of my own someday!

I knew, even from a young age, both of them were smart. Both were good people. Both were the embodiment of love. Poppie's real name—David Davidson—is actually on a plaque on the literal moon for his work at Boeing and a partnership with NASA that helped put the first man on the moon. And Gramsy could outcook even the best New Orleans chef. Her food remains legendary in our family, even today.

Well, after Poppie finished his important denture points, Gramsy joined the conversation. She took her teeth out, too, and began offering her own top cleaning techniques. It's like we were all of a sudden at a denture convention and they were the top panelists. I just wanted to eat my gumbo! Gramsy explained how the dentures fit snugly into her mouth, how they sat nicely on her gums and were secure there. Both continued to proudly display their well-cared-for false teeth at the dinner table, their stomachs full and appetites long appeased. My appetite? By then, my appetite was out the window. But it was a small price to pay for this memorable tableside show.

Gramsy and Poppie, Poppie and Gramsy. Yes, they (along with my mother) were my heroes growing up. I'm not close with my father's parents (heck, I'm not all that close with my dad either). But Gramsy and Poppie were like a second pair of parents to me and my siblings.

My mother was a single parent. My father was a bank robber. When he went to jail, our family needed help. Enter: Gramsy and Poppie, who selflessly put their ideas of retirement away to help raise four kids (including a fabulous granddaughter who would one day become a DJ for one of the most popular independent radio stations in the country and a columnist for The Stranger). They cared for us and, as a result, I never felt like anything was missing in my life.

Gramsy’s real name was Eva—I was named after her. The story goes: pregnant with me (and your Uncle Cedric), my mom had made up her mind that my first name was going to be something completely different. But when I popped out of the womb, as my mom stared at me, she exclaimed, “Oh goodness, forget that other name! This is Eva! She looks just like my mom!” As they say in the Black community, I was a bright-skinned child or a “high yellow” baby. And I apparently also looked like a 65-year-old Creole woman with fake teeth. I'll take it!

Gransy and Poppie met in New Orleans. He used to walk by her house on the way to his job and every day he saw her, he fell more and more in love. One day, he asked if they could go out. That led to a relationship, which led to a marriage, which led to the family moving up to the Pacific Northwest. It's the Poppie and Gramsy butterfly effect!

Henny, I so wish you could have met them. Growing up was special. We ate so well every single day, I didn’t realize that red beans and rice, gumbo, yams, rice and gravy with shrimp Creole, greens, and cornbread weren’t what everyone else ate every week in the Northwest, too. Not until my grandma passed did I realize, “Oh shit! No one cooks like that up here!” And it wasn’t until your dad took me to New Orleans (where he also proposed), and we ate at a restaurant called Mother’s, that I was able to get a taste of the familiar flavors that brought back memories of sitting at the table in Gramsy’s kitchen.

I remember watching cartoons on a black-and-white TV, eating southern cuisine like a queen. Teleport me there now! Just for an hour!

While I was born in Seattle, and raised in the cloudy and grungy ’90s, inside our home it always felt like 1970s New Orleans. Wood paneling (still up by the way), plastic-covered furniture, doilies everywhere, Gramsy in her rocking chair listening to big band music on her AM radio that doubled as an 8-track player. Drapes, craftsman's wood, and the biggest floor model television sets you’ve ever seen, with matching gigantic remote controls that looked as if they powered Apollo 11. At night, your Uncle Cedric and I would routinely go into their bedroom to hang out while Gramsy while Poppie sat downstairs enjoying a glass of whiskey and his politically incorrect Westerns. Gramsy taught us how to play Go Fish, Uno, Pokeno and dominoes on her bed. Then we would watch the draw of her Keno lottery numbers, horse races, followed up with Nick at Night shows. Where is that teleportation device I ordered on Etsy!

But that brings me to you, dear Henny. Even though you never got a chance to meet Poppie and Gramsy, who died in the early 2000s, you do have the opportunity to meet your incredible grandmothers. Both my mom and your dad’s mom are remarkable women. Teachers; they raised six kids in total. They love to learn, read, laugh, and watch bad TV. They go to church, and they care about other people—even today, when that seems hardest.

The best thing is they love you to the ends of the Earth! My life is better knowing that they are in your life today. Believe me, your father and I will always be there for you, but there is nothing like the love you get from a grandparent, from someone who's been around long enough to need dentures. It’s the coolest fucking shit there is.

Eva Walker is a writer, a KEXP DJ, one-half of the rock duo the Black Tones, and mom to her baby girl, Hendrix. She also cowrote the book The Sound of Seattle: 101 Songs That Shaped a City, which was released in 2024. Every month for The Stranger, she writes a letter to Hendrix to share wisdom learned from her experiences—and her mistakes. Read all installments here.

Dear Hendrix

Eva Walker — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 14:00:00 -0800

Every month for The Stranger, Eva Walker writes a letter to her daughter, Hendrix, to share wisdom learned from her experiences—and her mistakes. by Eva Walker

Dear Hendrix,

One Saturday morning, without telling your father, I went into the bathroom of our tiny studio apartment and pissed on a stick.

It was just a few days after attending the Sawtooth music festival in Idaho. While there, I felt so good from performing in the mountains, seeing all our friends, soaking up the sunshine, and listening to all the good music that I thought, “You know what? I'm in a good mood. I want to try acid!”

Until then, I’d never really tried any drug besides weed and expired, ineffective mushrooms. Still, I had always been curious about psychedelics. Maybe it's the unreal colors people claim to see? The floating feeling they talk about? I don’t quite know. But my anxiety was always the reason I stayed away from the stuff. Because if I know one thing about those drugs, it’s that you should be in a good headspace when you dive in. (And, don’t forget, never with losers.)

At Sawtooth, I was feeling great. Happy and more relaxed than I had felt in a while. But just as I asked my close friend how to safely get some, I suddenly remembered: Your dad and I had been trying to have a baby. I blurted out, “Wait! I can’t try psychedelics right now! I might be pregnant!”

Fast-forward to that fateful Saturday morning with the pee and the stick. I placed the newly dampened pregnancy test on the counter and waited. Butterflies swirled in my stomach. Then, boom! There it was. The second blue line. The blue line that confirmed what I had suspected: I had a baby growing inside me.

At the time, your dad and I had just started writing our book, The Sound of Seattle: 101 Songs That Shaped a City. (Available at bookstores everywhere! And a great holiday gift!) As I walked out of the bathroom, he looked at me and started talking about this band or that artist and how the book should maybe go this or that direction… blah blah blah… All I could say was, “I’m sorry, I’m totally distracted right now!”

“Is everything ok?” he asked.

“Yeah… um… I’m pregnant.”

We both paused for a moment. I was stoked, but also shocked. Your dad was, well, shocked and then stoked. He stopped what he was doing with the book, said some nice supportive shit that I can’t remember, and hugged me. And then, his back seized up. Like, totally froze. The news of being a new dad went directly to his shoulders, and he couldn’t move! It was like a scene straight from a sitcom. We laugh about it now.

Not long after that, we were lying in bed thinking of baby names. For a boy, we had names like Davidson (my maternal grandfather’s last name), Thurgood (the first Black Supreme Court justice), Warsaw (literally because of a street I used to drive past as a kid), and Michael. For a girl, we agreed we liked more masculine-sounding names. Austin, Payton, Hudson, and Thompson (the names of two of the members of the local band THEM). I did like some classic girl names, too—Rose, Stella, and Estelle. But then it came to me. “If she’s a girl, what if we named her Hendrix?” Your dad immediately responded in the surest tone, “That’s fucking awesome!”

Does it have something to do with the legendary guitar player? Fuck yeah it does! But it’s deeper than that. This may come as a surprise to you, but your outspoken indie-rocker radio DJ mother was a rather socially awkward and quiet teenager. I had friends, but didn’t hang out with many of them outside of school. When I did, we would just play music or watch Alice in Chains videos. Or I would opt to hang out with the 60-to-70-year-old Black men who gathered every early evening at a coffee shop on 23rd and Jackson. I was the dorky kid who lugged a guitar with me everywhere, and, Henny, I even had a wallet chain. It was far out.

But what comes with being a Black teenage girl in the Pacific Northwest in the early 2000s who likes rock and wears wallet chains is that everyone around you tells you how white you are. They say things like, “You play guitar? That’s super white!” Or “You’re like the whitest Black person I know!” Or, my favorite, “Blacks don’t play guitar!” That last one came from a Black girl. These ideas come from all sorts of people who were—and are—ignorant of the diversity of Blackness, as well as Black people who don’t know their own history. (I’m here to pick on EVERYONE. This wasn’t limited to just white people. I heard it from all walks of life.)

At the time, though, I didn’t realize how wrong they were. I thought they were right. Not because I wanted to be white, but because all of the guitarists I’d seen on TV were white guys—from grunge to those acoustic jam band boys. So maybe it is a white thing. Maybe I should stop. Maybe this wasn’t meant for me…

Then I was introduced to the music of Jimi Hendrix. I can’t remember my music life before knowing him. I was hooked. I was flabbergasted. I was broken in the best sense of the word. Everything I thought I knew about life and being Black with a guitar went up in a purple haze. That was the realization that made me say out loud, “Black people DO play guitar!” I. Was. OBSESSED. I began listening to the Smash Hits compilation that your grandma got me one Christmas.

Like any guitar player, my ego obviously made me believe I was Jimi reincarnated. I mean, it just made sense, right??? We were both skinny, awkward, born and raised in Seattle, and Black… I mean, come on! He died in 1970, and I was born in 1989, giving him 19 years to reincarnate as me… not crazy at all. Totally normal, like my tinfoil hat! I even started dressing like him, and wearing loud red velvet pants and velvet vests… I wore lots and lots of velvet. I also wore psychedelic colors (before my all-black phase began, which continues to this day). Most of the clothes I had were my mom’s. Either she would hand them down to me, or I would sneak into her closet after she left for work—shout-out to moms!

Jimi Hendrix was the first person who made me feel seen. His presence, his music, his whole goddamn existence flipped a switch in my brain that made me go, “I can absolutely pursue this guitar thing!” Before, I’d considered putting the guitar down because I felt so out of place and discouraged by the outside world, from my peers to MTV. I don’t know if I would be where I am today had I not been introduced to Hendrix, the guitarist.

Since then, of course, I’ve learned about a whole giant bunch of Black guitarists, and I would have eventually heard of Jimi because he’s the greatest of all time, but I really needed him at that point in my youth, and he got me through some hardcore self-doubt. When people say representation is important, this is example No. 1 for me.

He was the spark I needed to stay persistent in the thing I loved doing—playing the guitar. So, when you came around, I felt as if I owed him my firstborn child. But, since he died decades ago, I thought that giving you his name was an acceptable alternative. We hope you like it!

(Oh, by the way: I still haven’t tried acid, and at this point, I'm no longer interested. Although I did tell myself that if I make it to 80 years old, I might give it a second thought. Check back in with me then!)