Hendrix & Co. PLAYLIST — his contemporaries, collaborators and disciples
I’m a guitar player. This is a blog about music. A Hendrix post is inevitable, so let’s just get to it.
80-odd years into the history of the electric guitar and nearly 30 years since his death, there’s still no one who can touch Hendrix.
Hendrix had a secret weapon. He was a black American. He had actually been steeped in, educated in, BASTED in real American blues and R&B on the Chitlin’ Circuit. He backed up Little Richard, King Curtis and many others. The pretenders, your Claptons, Pages and so on, they could only…well…pretend to know about that stuff. Jimi lived it.
When he plugged into the cultural revolution of the 60s, loads of drugs and alcohol, many Marshall stacks and a wah-wah pedal (now worth $15,500), he brought America’s most deeply rooted folk music into the Space Age. No one else could credibly be said to have come from and combined both of those worlds in the same way. Which is what made him the greatest.
One of the fellas who comes in a close second to Jimi (purely as a guitar player) is Roy Buchanan. Dig his version of “Hey Joe” for comparison’s sake. BTW, the two of them played together on more than one occasion.