The Historic Day Jimi Hendrix Rocked 'The Star-Spangled Banner'

With the Fourth of July holiday arriving in the United States, renditions of “The Star-Spangled Banner” will undoubtedly be heard across the nation to celebrate the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.

And when thinking of the national anthem, it’s difficult to not let your mind drift to what is probably the most famous version ever recorded — Jimi Hendrix’s feedback-drenched performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the Woodstock Music and Art Festival on Aug. 18, 1969.

The iconic event occurred in Bethel, N.Y., on Max Yasgur’s alfalfa field, with estimates putting peak attendance at over a half-million people. But by the time Hendrix took the stage at 8 a.m. that fateful Monday (he was scheduled to perform the previous day, but rain had washed out many of the Sunday performances), the audience had thinned to about 30,000 to 40,000.

Those lucky thousands witnessed history.

At this time, Hendrix was a global sensation, having taken the world by storm with the Jimi Hendrix Experience and groundbreaking albums like Are You Experienced? and Axis: Bold as Love.

For his headlining set at Woodstock, however, Hendrix had formed another band with bassist Billy Cox, guitarist Larry Lee, percussionists Juma Sultan and Jerry Velez, and drummer Mitch Mitchell following the breakup of the Experience earlier that year.

This group tore through several of Hendrix’s most fiery favorites, like “Hear My Train a Comin’,” “Foxy Lady” and “Fire,” before breaking into an improvised piece.

Hendrix expertly played his Stratocaster, free-form style, for a few minutes before launching into a distorted, wrenching interpretation of “The Star-Spangled Banner”.

Some contended that he was making a political statement on the war in Vietnam and unrest in the United States, but Hendrix flatly stated afterward that he meant no such commentary, explaining that his motivation was purely musical and that he was simply improvising a different interpretation (“The Star-Spangled Banner” had actually been in his set for about a year by that time).

And when watching it on its own, it’s also easy to assume that it must have been the finale of his two-hour set when in fact it wasn’t—Hendrix followed it with “Purple Haze,” “Woodstock Improvisation” and “Villanova Junction Blues” before concluding the performance (and the festival) with “Hey Joe.”

Woodstock is one of the singularly defining Hendrix performances, and it is a landmark moment of his career, of rock music up to that point, and of the 1960s, which were just about to end. Britain dominated rock and pop during that decade, but Hendrix dominated all as a wholly separate entity — an enigmatic and phenomenally talented musician from the United States, playing a U.S.-made Fender electric guitar model soon to be ubiquitous largely because of him.

And when he took the stage on a late summer morning in 1969, Stratocaster in hand, and played the U.S. national anthem as it had never been played before, the occasion became one of the great moments of the 1960s and of rock history ... one that guitarists young and old emulate to this day.

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