The Story of Jimi Hendrix’s First Guitar

Each world well-known artist needed to begin someplace. For Jimi Hendrix, that someplace was Seattle the place he began his six-string journey with an outdated ukulele.

Because the story goes, a teenage Hendrix was serving to his father filter the house of an older girl sooner or later. Among the many garbage was a ukulele with just one string that the lady advised Hendrix he might have. One string was evidently all of the 15-year-old wanted to start out studying songs like “Hound Canine” by Elvis Presley by ear.

Roughly a yr later, Hendrix lastly bought his fingers on his first actual guitar, an acoustic that price him $5 (about $55 in 2025), the precise make and mannequin of which is unclear. “Once I first began enjoying guitar [was] means up within the Northwest, in Seattle, Washington,” Hendirx mentioned in a 1967 interview, citing individuals like Muddy Waters, Elmore James and Robert Johnson as influences. “They do not have too lots of the actual blues singers up there.”

It was round this time, Feb. 20, 1959 to be actual, that Hendrix made his reside debut within the basement of a synagogue, Seattle’s Temple De Hirsch, the place he had been invited to audition for an area band. However Hendrix’s model proved too animated for his or her style and his audition was over simply as shortly because it started — the band thought he was an excessive amount of of a showcase.

Earlier than lengthy, Hendrix fashioned his personal group, the Velvetones, however quickly found out that his acoustic guitar wasn’t going to chop it.

Jimi Hendrix Plugs In

“Once I was 17 I fashioned this group with another guys, however they drowned me out,” he would say to Guitar Participant in 1968 (by way of The Guardian). “I did not know why at first, however after about three months I spotted I would must get an electrical guitar. My first was a Danelectro, which my dad purchased for me. Will need to have busted him for a very long time. However I needed to present him I might play first.”

Hendrix, after all, wound up doing precisely that.

“Expensive Dad, I nonetheless have my guitar and amp and so long as I’ve that, no idiot can maintain me from residing,” he wrote in a letter to his father in 1965. Hendrix was then residing in New York Metropolis and enjoying guitar in varied bands. “There’s a couple of file firms I visited that I most likely can file for. … I simply needed to let you realize I am nonetheless right here, making an attempt to make it. Though I do not eat on daily basis, every part’s going all proper for me. It might be worse than this, however I will maintain hustling and scuffling till I get issues to occurring like they’re speculated to for me.”

READ MORE: 60 Greatest Jimi Hendrix Songs

Hendrix’s assortment would broaden to incorporate a myriad of guitars, most notably his signature Stratocaster. In 1968, he supplied some phrases of recommendation to aspiring musicians, guitar gamers particularly: “You need to keep it up. Typically you will be so pissed off you wish to quit the guitar, you will hate the guitar. However all of that is simply part of studying, as a result of should you keep it up you are going to be rewarded.”

Watch Jimi Hendrix Performing in 1965