How Jimi Hendrix Came to Own His First Electric Guitar
Jimi Hendrix was known around the world for his unbeatable guitar skills. And while he became a rock icon for playing the guitar (and infamously destroying some of them) at a later age, guitars were very valuable to Hendrix when he was young.
Jimi Hendrix’s makeshift electric guitar
Jimi Hendrix and his family didn’t have much money when he and his brother Leon were growing up. But their love for music couldn’t be stopped by lack of funds, and they tried to make do with what they had. Jimi had an acoustic guitar, but electric guitars were more popular at the time. As a result, he and his brother created an electric guitar themselves.
Author Philip Norman described how Hendrix did this in the 2020 book Wild Thing: The Short, Spellbinding Life of Jimi Hendrix.
“The most exciting sounds came from electric guitars, of which the cheapest seemed astronomically expensive to [Jimi]. But if a purpose-built model was out of reach, an acoustic one could be electrified by a metal pickup attached under the base of the fretboard with an exposed jack-lead that plugged into an amplifier,” Norman explained. “He saved enough for the pickup but, of course, had no amp: the only way to produce a similar effect was to wire it through his father’s jealously guarded record player.”
The DIY setup proved useful, albeit with some physical pain for Leon. “This worked as long as Leon held down a connection with one finger, which he loyally kept doing even though it gave him an electric shock. The unaccustomed power made the record-player’s speaker crackle and buzz.”
Leon Hendrix didn’t mind being shocked, however, saying, “Not only did we have an electric guitar going, but we had distortion.”
How Jimi Hendrix got his first electric guitar
Jimi Hendrix’s Aunt Ernestine noted her nephew’s passion for music at an early age, and often urged his father Al to help foster the talent. In 1958, his father bought him his acoustic guitar for $5, and according to Norman, when Hendrix was a teenager, Ernestine told Al he needed to buy Jimi an electric guitar — in part because his instrument was falling apart.
“Several of [Jimi’s] friends by now owned all-electric guitars with flat bodies and spiky headstocks that made his once-treasured acoustic Kay feel as ancient as a Model T Ford and reduced it to silence if ever he tried to jam with them. Indeed, so long and hard had he practised that it was literally falling to pieces,” Norman wrote. “Once again, his Aunt Ernestine came to his aid, telling her brother-in-law at every opportunity, ‘You have to get that boy an electric guitar.'”
“Finally Al agreed to go with him to Myers Music store, but when confronted with its wall display of guitars, backed away muttering that they were all unaffordably expensive,” Norman continued. “This routine was repeated several times until, just when it seemed hopeless, he agreed to put a down payment on another, far superior Kay, a fifteen-dollar Supro Ozark whose gorgeously solid body had a ‘champagne’ (i.e., off-white) finish.”
Jimi Hendrix’s father was strict with his guitar playing
As a left-handed guitarist, Jimi annoyed his father whenever he played guitar upside down. Getting hit over the head wasn’t an uncommon occurrence for Hendrix: his father punished him every time he used his left hand to play.
It stemmed from a deep-seated belief that left-handedness was a mark of the devil. Hendrix’s father, who was born with extra fingers (also viewed to be a mark of the devil), attempted to “correct” what he thought he could fix.
