portrait of this blog's author - by Stephen Blackman 2008

Monday, September 30, 2024

Jimi Hendrix - Red House (Live in Sweden 1969)

 guitarists contd., with Jimi hisself!

While Jimi Hendrix is often hailed as “rock’s greatest guitarist,” the music he most closely identified with was the blues. After all, this had been the soundtrack of his youth, the music he heard his paternal grandmother sing and his father play on their record player. “Jimi lived on blues around the house,” Al Hendrix remembered. “I had a lot of records by B.B. King and Louis Jordan and some of the downhome guys like Muddy Waters. Jimi was real excited by B.B. King and Chuck Berry, and he was a fan of Albert King too. He liked all them blues guitarists. He’d try to copy what he’d heard, and he’d make up stuff too.”
Jimi’s account of his musical roots aligned with his father’s: “I was largely influenced by blues when I first started,” he reported in Rolling Stone. “When I first started playing guitar, it was way up in the Northwest, in Seattle, Washington, and they don’t have too many real blues singers up there. The first guitarist I was aware of was Muddy Waters. I heard one of his old records when I was a little boy, and it scared me to death. Wow! What was that all about? It was great.” 

2 comments:

diamonddave said...

The best ever. No one has ever come close (except SRV) in my opinion. I love it when you produce these Jimi snippets. Excellent stuff. DD

Andy Swapp said...

Thanks Dave - ain't this one great!? Thanks for dropping by as ever neighbour!