Jimi Hendrix National Anthem Tabs

How Jimi Hendrix turned the Star Spangled Banner into a protest anthem

(Image credit: Larry Hulst / Getty Images)

Author Corey A. Washington'due south book Jimi Hendrix Blackness Legacy: A Dream Deferred (opens in new tab) is an exploration of Jimi Hendrix'southward impact on Black culture. It interviews people who knew Hendrix – including his brother, Leon – alongside many voices not unremarkably heard from in traditional Hendrix biographies.

The book examines Hendrix'southward influence on many genres of music – including dejection, soul, funk, rock and hip hop – and shines a new low-cal on his legacy. In this edited excerpt, Washington explores how Jimi'southward versions of The Star Spangled Banner painted a startling film of a chaotic America, one that resonates to this day.

Fashion before Childish Gambino'south burning excoriation of America's hypocrisy through his song and thought-provoking video, This is America (opens in new tab), Jimi Hendrix had given his rendering of the national anthem the aforementioned title. He explained his rationale at a concert at the Winterland Theater in San Francisco, during the second show on October 10, 1968.

"We would like to continue on with a thing called This is America, representing the sounds and feedback which you lot'll hear, is really lost souls and frustration, it seems like to me," said Hendrix. "I don't know though, we're just messengers. We'll see if we can go this feeling across to you, perhaps through all this racket that some people think we're making upwardly. (Jimi playfully changes his voice: "I don't remember it's racket.")

"Information technology'south a affair. You go tired of playing notes sometimes, so you desire to go close to playing exactly what you call a 'truthful feeling', regardless if it's..." (Jimi plays some feedback and so a standard rock n roll riff, followed by what sounds similar surf music.)

Jimi Hendrix Winterland poster — Jimi Hendrix Winterland affiche (Prototype credit: GAB Annal / Getty Images)

There's some great research on Jimi's relationship with the national anthem past Mark A. Clague entitled: This is America: Jimi Hendrix'due south StarSpangled Banner Journey as Psychedelic Citizenship (opens in new tab). He breaks down the highlights of Jimi performing the national anthem 63 times over a two-twelvemonth period between August 1968 and August 1970.

His inquiry shows how Jimi's canticle rendition morphed into a political statement, fifty-fifty transforming into a phone call for action. Of note is Clague'due south recognition of Jimi 'code switching' to speak to ii dissimilar sets of people, sometimes even at the same time.

For instance, when Jimi has a press conference in Harlem to announce a benefit concert for Harlem'southward United Block Association, a reporter asked him most his canticle performance at Woodstock. Jimi explained that the canticle was originally written in a beautiful land, just when he plays it now, he plays it the way that America is in its current state, with lots of static and friction in the air.

Jimi's manager, Mike Jeffery, spent one-half of 1969 and virtually of 1970, doing damage control, trying to get Jimi to distance himself from The Black Panthers and other controversial leftist groups. That didn't piece of work. At the Jimi Hendrix Feel concert at the LA Forum on April 25, 1969, a little over three months from his concert at Woodstock, Jimi would brand Colin Kaepernick'due south kneeling for the anthem look very tame.

Jimi saw what was going on in the country and used his artistic platform to speak out. Jimi advertizing-libs in-between playing the anthem: Jimi plays a brusque intro, then says: "Here'south a song that nosotros was (sic) all brainwashed with, call up this oldies but goodies." Jimi plays some more, then briefly stops playing to disdainfully utter "BS" on the hypocritical state of affairs going on in the U.Southward.

Afterward at Woodstock, he would tone down the vocal aggression and put that fire into his instrumental interpretation, as he masterfully and sonically painted an accurate motion-picture show of the chaos America was in, every bit it relates to the Vietnam War, civil rights, clashes betwixt the haves and have-nots, hippies and squares, conservatives and liberals, and anybody else fed up with being lied to.

At this indicate it should be articulate, that the same kind of people that are overly disquisitional of Kaepernick and other NFL players that are protesting, are the aforementioned kind of people that chided Jimi for his honest exposé of America via his rendering of the national anthem, specifically at Woodstock.

Jimi would proceed to force the issue in 1970. On May 30th, 1970, at the Community Theater, in Berkeley California, he dedicated the concert to The Black Panthers, since they were near their stomping grounds of Oakland. A month earlier on April 25, at the Los Angeles Forum, he played another rather insubordinate rendition of the national anthem, where he referenced "the home of the pigs and the violence of the Black Panthers." To top it off, he spelled America, 'A-M-E-R-I-Thousand.'

Jimi would exist featured in the 1969 March edition of Circus Magazine, where he spoke candidly almost race in America and The Black Panthers. The article was entitled: Jimi Hendrix On Black And White America. Jimi spoke most writing a vocal dedicated to The Blackness Panthers. He was asked virtually his perspective on America, now that he had lived in London.

Jimi: "(I) saw why people put this country downwardly. I yet dear America – quite naturally – only I can run into why people put it downward. It has so much proficient in information technology, you lot know, but it has so much evil also, and that's because so much of it is based on money. That'south really then sick." He and so chimes in on Race Relations.

Jimi: "The black person argues with the white person, that he's been treated badly for the last 200 years. Well, he has, but now is the fourth dimension to work it out, instead of talking nearly the past.

"We know the past is all screwed up, and then instead of talking virtually it, let's become things together now."

Corey A. Washington'south Jimi Hendrix Blackness Legacy: A Dream Deferred is out now (opens in new tab).