Jimi Hendrix Accomplishments

Introduction Since the guitar became popular in Western culture, there has always been a debate on who was the greatest guitar player. Some names that have been used in this eternal discussion include Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Eddie Van Halen, Eric Clapton, and David Gilmour in the music community. These guitarists all have different styles, tastes, and play different genres of music yet remain set in stone as some of the greatest guitar players ever.

Jimi Hendrix Jimi Hendrix was born James Hendrix in 1942 in Seattle, Washington. He was a former paratrooper during the Vietnam War and was given an Honorary Medical Discharge (Shaar Murray, 2018). He moved to England and showed off his showmanship and his amazing talent at guitar. He moved

As stated in his article in the Britannica Encyclopedia (2018), “Though his active career as a featured artist lasted a mere four years, Hendrix altered the course of popular music and became one of the most successful and influential musicians of his era. An instrumentalist who radically redefined the expressive potential and sonic palette of the electric guitar, he was the composer of a classic repertoire of songs ranging from ferocious rockers to delicate, complex ballads. …Moreover, he was a visionary who collapsed the genre boundaries of rock, soul, blues, and jazz and an iconic figure whose appeal linked the concerns of white hippies and black revolutionaries by clothing black anger in the colorful costumes of London’s Carnaby Street.” To summarize this quote, Jimi Hendrix fused the tones of blues, rock, soul and jazz music to create beautiful guitar riffs and delicate melodies. He also used British rock techniques to his advantage, which he learned from his time in London. “Jimi Hendrix, … American rock guitarist, singer, and composer who fused American traditions of blues, jazz, rock, and soul with techniques of British avant-garde rock to redefine the electric guitar in his own image” (Shaar Murray, 2018,

“His playing was effortless. There's not one minute of his recorded career that feels like he's working hard at it – it feels like it's all flowing through him” (Browne et al., 2015, p.1). His music appealed to young hippies and black people who wanted more civil rights (Shaar Murray, 2018). He also was very knowledgeable about the music theory behind rock music, and was admired and respected by many. “Hendrix had an encyclopedic knowledge of the musical roots on which the cutting-edge rock of his time was based, but, thanks to his years on the road with the likes of Little Richard and the Isley Brothers, he also had hands-on experience of the cultural and social worlds in which those roots had developed and a great admiration for the work of Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and the Yardbirds” (Shaar Murray, 2018, p.1).

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