So true. Hendrix was a total student of the blues and also a master. I'm listening to a vinyl copy of the Hendrix :blues album right now. Something I realized a few years ago is that my favorite rock guys all had something in common, namely that they could play a convincing blues. To me the most interesting players are the ones who spent their formative years locked in their rooms playing blues albums over and over again to pick up the nuances. By the way, I'm sort of an "old soul" too, musically. I was Zep, Hendrix, Cream, Floyd in high school (early 90s), then started branching backwards from there. In college I was wearing out Freddy King and Albert King tapes.
When I first got into Hendrix I was young and liked reality loud so I was all about the tooth picking and guitar burning, and that stuff is still pretty exciting. But as I’ve aged and quieted down a bit his renditions of “Red House” and “Hear my Train A Comin” loom much larger in his catalog for me. Sometimes you have to age into music.