KISS THE SKY

Genius, visionary... Jimi Hendrix was the greatest guitar player that ever lived. With the 50th anniversary of his death arriving on September 18th 2020, Total Guitar celebrates the life and art of the man who reinvented the electric guitar for generations to come…

- Amit Sharma

In many ways, it’s like the electric guitar didn’t really exist before him. Of course, Jimi Hendrix had his influences – Muddy Waters and Albert King to name just two. But it was Hendrix who radically revolutionized the instrument once and for all, and the impact he made in the late 60s has not been surpassed in all the years since.

It was Jimi who turned the six-string into a weapon, with its bullets cast in a melting pot of hot-rodded blues, molten fuzz and screaming psychedelia. No longer did the guitar feel like it was in the background, accompanying the rest of the band or adding melodies to help reinforce a lyric. It was now the undisputed star of the show. The guitar hero had arrived.

Born in Seattle on November 27th 1942, Johnny Allen Hendrix – renamed James Marshall Hendrix at the age of four – had a fairly unstable upbringing. It was actually a school social worker at the Horace Mann Elementary who noticed him carrying a broom around much like a guitar, and wrote to her seniors to request a real instrument for his psychological growth, using funding for underprivileged children. Sadly, her efforts failed. But a few years later, Jimi found an old ukulele with only one string, on which he started learning his favourite Elvis Presley songs. Eventually he acquired his first acoustic for $5, swiftly followed by his first electric – a white Supro Ozark – on which he started crafting his own style, built off what he’d learned from the likes of blues pioneers Howlin’ Wolf and Robert Johnson. “Sometimes you’ll want to give up the guitar,” Hendrix himself once admitted. “You’ll hate the guitar. But if you stick with it, you’re gonna be rewarded...”