Jimi Hendrix was born 80 years ago today.
Born Johnny Allen Hendrix, Hendrix was musician, singer and songwriter. Despite a relatively brief mainstream career spanning four years, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential electric guitarists in the history of popular music, and one of the most celebrated musicians of the 20th century.
Born in Seattle, Hendrix began playing guitar at the age of 15. In 1961, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and was granted an honorable discharge the following year.
Soon afterward, he moved to Clarksville, Tennessee, and began playing gigs on the Chitlin' Circuit, eventually earning a place in the Isley Brothers' backing band and later finding work with Little Richard, with whom he continued to play through mid-1965. He then joined Curtis Knight and the Squires before moving to England in late 1966 after having been discovered by bassist Chas Chandler of the Animals.
Within months, Hendrix had earned three UK top ten hits with the Jimi Hendrix Experience: "Hey Joe," "Purple Haze" and "The Wind Cries Mary." He achieved fame in the U.S. after his performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, and in 1968 his third and final studio album, Electric Ladyland, reached #1 in the U.S.
The double LP was Hendrix's most commercially successful release and his first and only #1 album. He headlined the Woodstock Festival in 1969 and the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 as the world's highest-paid performer before dying from barbiturate-related asphyxia on September 18, 1970 at the age of 27.
Hendrix was inspired musically by American rock and roll and electric blues. He favored overdriven amplifiers with high volume and gain, and was instrumental in developing the previously undesirable technique of guitar amplifier feedback. He helped to popularize the use of a wah-wah pedal in mainstream rock, and was the first artist to use stereophonic phasing effects in music recordings.
"Hendrix pioneered the use of the instrument as an electronic sound source. Players before him had experimented with feedback and distortion, but Hendrix turned those effects and others into a controlled, fluid vocabulary every bit as personal as the blues with which he began," wrote Holly George-Warren of Rolling Stone.
Here, Hendrix performs the “Star Spangled Banner” at Woodstock, 1969
Jimi Hendrix performs Bob Dylan’s "All Along the Watchtower,” Atlanta, 1970