okay, but if you're going to go down that way, you'll need to know where Hendrix got his information and musical upbringing (probably rock and roll and blues), and then go down the drain of the artists those RnR/Blues/RnB/whatever artists were inspired by. Where do we stop factoring in what came before and simply enjoy it for what it is? Why is Hendrix (in your example) the cut-off point and not Robert Johnson? Or any other artist?
If you consider all music to be an art form and art is not static and does not exist in a vacuum, that means all music conceived has drawn inspiration from some music somebody else created first. Some people (let's call them the canon) have had more influence than others (Hendrix, The Beatles, but also Bach, Beethoven, Brahms etc.), but does influencing somebody else make you good per se? I absolutely agree that in order to properly understand stuff, you need to know what it comes from, but also what it is, does, or tries to do. That said, from an artistic standpoint, I think it's very silly to say stuff like 'guitarists in the 70s were the best ever' or 'the best pop songs were made by the Beatles' or 'Jimi Hendrix was the best guitarist ever to grace the earth', so in that respect I also agree with a lot of what Kotowboy suggests.