🇺🇸 Jimi Hendrix

Biography

The first instrument Jimi Hendrix ever played was a ukulele with a single string. He found it while helping his father clean out a house in Seattle in 1957, and he spent weeks working out the melody to "Honky Tonk Women" on that single string before his father relented and bought him a five-dollar acoustic guitar. He was fifteen years old, completely self-taught, and he could already hear in his head sounds that no existing guitarist had yet produced. Within four years, by his own account, he had listened to every blues record he could find and figured out how to make an electric guitar do everything those records could do — and everything they couldn't.

James Marshall Hendrix was born November 27, 1942, in Seattle, Washington, the son of Al Hendrix and Lucille Jeter. His childhood was unstable: his parents divorced, he moved frequently between relatives, and he spent time in youth corrections facilities. But the guitar anchored him. By sixteen he was playing in local Seattle bands. By seventeen he had dropped out of high school. At nineteen, after a brief stint in the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division that ended with an honorable discharge following an injury, he went to Nashville and began working as a session and touring guitarist, backing acts like Little Richard, the Isley Brothers, and Sam Cooke.

Those years on the chitlin' circuit — the network of venues across the American South and Midwest that hosted Black performers during the era of segregation — were Hendrix's graduate school. He absorbed every technique available, then began discarding what didn't interest him. He was left-handed and played a right-handed guitar strung upside down, which gave him an unconventional attack on the strings and a thumb technique over the neck that no one else had developed. He could make the guitar talk, cry, and shriek. He was also, by all accounts, one of the most technically gifted sight-readers in the rooms he worked, though he rarely mentioned it.

In 1966, guitarist Chas Chandler — former bassist for the Animals — saw Hendrix performing in a small New York club and brought him to London. The British rock scene, then at the peak of its creative confidence, was undone. Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, and Jeff Beck — the three guitarists the British press had been describing as the finest in the world — each saw Hendrix perform within months of his arrival and each separately described the experience as humbling. Clapton reportedly walked offstage after watching Hendrix play and told his manager he was quitting. He did not quit. He went home and practiced for three months.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience — Hendrix, bassist Noel Redding, and drummer Mitch Mitchell — released their debut album Are You Experienced in May 1967. It reached number two on the UK charts (held off number one only by the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band) and contained tracks — "Purple Haze," "Foxy Lady," "The Wind Cries Mary," "Hey Joe" — that functioned less like pop songs and more like demonstrations of what an electric guitar could do when someone genuinely understood its possibilities. The feedback, the whammy bar manipulations, the controlled distortion — none of it had been assembled into this kind of musical argument before.

His performance of "The Star-Spangled Banner" at Woodstock in August 1969 — played alone on electric guitar before an audience of 400,000 — is one of the most analyzed musical performances in American history. What Hendrix did with the national anthem was not desecration, as some critics charged, but deconstruction: he played the melody straight, then bent it into the sounds of the previous decade — jet aircraft, explosions, sirens, crowd noise — before returning it to its original form. It lasted three minutes and fifty-one seconds and said more about the state of the United States in 1969 than most books written about that year.

He released three studio albums in three years — Are You Experienced (1967), Axis: Bold as Love (1967), and Electric Ladyland (1968) — and was recording a fourth when he died in London on September 18, 1970, at the age of twenty-seven. The cause was asphyxiation related to barbiturate intoxication. He had been awake and working in the studio until two days before. In the four years between his arrival in London and his death, he had permanently altered the technical and expressive vocabulary of the electric guitar, influenced every rock guitarist who followed him, and left behind a body of work that has never lost its capacity to surprise.

Timeline

Peers in Perspective