Electric Bluesman: The Life and Times of Jimi Hendrix

Storming London as a black guitarist in a world of white musicians, Jimi Hendrix reclaimed rock and roll as true American music.

• His first guitar was an old, beat-up acoustic that he carried on his back through the streets of Seattle.
• For years, he played the Chitlin' Circuit in the South, learning from great blues players like B. B. King and Howlin' Wolf, who admired Hendrix's manner and style.
• He was always learning and absorbing the blues, becoming so skillful that he rocked the world of music.

Jimi Hendrix extravagantly used electric guitar feedback and distortion from devices like the wah pedal, fuzz face, and Octavia, and wove them into the rhythm of blues-based rock and roll, creating loud, careening sounds that nature could hardly duplicate. Storming the London music scene as a black man in a world of white musicians like Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, and Peter Townshend, Hendrix made them look like imitators, which they sadly realized when they first heard him play in clubs, and reclaimed rock and roll as true American music. For rock and roll, however brilliantly and beautifully interpreted by great English bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, who spearheaded the British Invasion of music in the 1960s, the genre had its roots in the small, grimy dance halls and roadhouses in the heartland of America, where Jimi had grown up poor and destitute. And like a true bluesman, he found music to be his salvation. This is the story of Jimi Hendrix.