Jimi Hendrix
In his brief four-year reign as a superstar, Jimi Hendrix expanded the vocabulary of the electric rock guitar more than anyone before or since. Hendrix’s masterful guitar playing and experimentation has sometimes obscured his considerable gifts as a songwriter, singer, and master of a gamut of blues, R&B, and rock styles. Regardless of how Hendrix earned his acclaim, he has stood the test of time. He remains, indisputably, one of rock and roll’s greatest musicians.

A self-taught guitar player, the left-handed Hendrix played a right-handed Fender Stratocaster guitar turned upside down and re-strung to suit him. When Hendrix became an international superstar after playing at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, it seemed as if he'd appeared out of nowhere, but in fact he had served his apprenticeship in numerous R&B acts, working with such greats as Little Richard, the Isley Brothers, and King Curtis.

Hendrix began to see signs of success performing as a soloist in the mid-1960s. It was in a New York club that Hendrix was spotted by Animals bassist Chas Chandler. The first lineup of the Animals was about to split, and Chandler, looking to move into management, convinced Hendrix to move to London and record as a solo act in England. There a group was built around Hendrix, also featuring Mitch Mitchell on drums and Noel Redding on bass, that was dubbed the Jimi Hendrix Experience. The trio became stars with astonishing speed in the UK, where "Hey Joe," "Purple Haze," and "The Wind Cries Mary" all made the Top 10 in the first half of 1967. These tracks were also featured on their debut album, Are You Experienced?, which became a huge hit in the US after Hendrix created a sensation at the Monterey Pop Festival in June of 1967.

Are You Experienced? was an astonishing debut, particularly from a young R&B veteran who had rarely sung, and apparently never written his own material, before the Experience formed. What caught most people's attention at first was his virtuosic guitar playing, but Hendrix was also a first-rate songwriter, melding cosmic imagery with some surprisingly pop-savvy hooks and tender sentiments. Amazingly, Hendrix would only record three fully conceived studio albums in his lifetime. The following albums, Axis: Bold as Love and the double-LP Electric Ladyland, were more diffuse and experimental than Are You Experienced?. Hendrix also recorded a massive amount of unreleased studio material during his lifetime. Much of this (as well as entire live concerts) was issued posthumously.

It's extremely difficult to separate the facts of Hendrix's life from rumors and speculation. Everyone who knew him well, or claimed to know him well, has different versions of his state of mind by 1970. Critics have variously mused that he was going to go into jazz, that he was going to get deeper into the blues, that he was going to continue doing what he was doing, or that he was too confused to know what he was doing at all. The same confusion holds true for his death: contradictory versions of his final days have been given by his closest acquaintances of the time. He'd been working intermittently on a new album, tentatively titled First Ray of the New Rising Sun, when he died suddenly in London on September 18, 1970.

In his short life, Jimi Hendrix was able to make an enormous impact on music history. Hendrix was inducted into the United States Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1992 and the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2005. A star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was dedicated to Hendrix in 1994 and in 2003, Rolling Stone magazine gave Hendrix the number one position on their list of the "100 greatest guitarists of all time".