Jimi Hendrix’s 1st Guitar and How He Learned to Play It

Jimi Hendrix first started his career as a backing guitarist for rock ‘n’ roll legends like Little Richard and The Isley Brothers. But long before he began performing as a professional guitarist, he fell in love with the instrument as a child.

Jimi Hendrix started playing a ukelele before playing guitar

Philip Norman’s 2020 book Wild Thing: The Short, Spellbinding Life of Jimi Hendrix outlines Hendrix’s life from his upbringing to his international stardom. He came from a humble background, and begged his father for a guitar even when they were struggling to get by.

“[Hendrix’s father] Al Hendrix’s fortunes took another of their frequent downswings,” Norman wrote. “Having scraped together enough to take out a mortgage on a small house, he could not keep up the payments; the property was repossessed and he and Buster [Jimi’s nickname as a child] went to live in a boarding house kept by a Mrs. McKay. There in a back room Buster found an old Kay acoustic guitar which had been bought for their landlady’s paraplegic son and which she was willing to sell for $5.”

“He begged his father to buy it for him, but the cash-strapped Al bluntly refused to finance such a seeming total irrelevance,” he continued. “His pleas were supported by his mother’s sister, Ernestine, a perceptive woman who had noticed the transformative effects of the one-string ukelele, and when his dad proved immovable, Aunt Ernestine gave him the money.” 

Jimi Hendrix’s first guitar

Hendrix fell in love with his guitar, and was practically inseparable from his new instrument. According to Hendrix’s brother Leon, he completely forgot about playing sports and only focused on guitar.

“He wasn’t ever apart from it,” he said, according to Wild Thing. “There was a film out then named Johnny Guitar, where this guy played by Sterling Hayden went around everywhere, carrying his guitar on his back. My brother did the same. He’d play it in bed, fall asleep with it on his chest, then start playing it again as soon as he woke up. To keep me quiet while he was learning, he’d tie a pencil to my wrist to force me to draw or do my homework. For me, it was as good as going to university.”

Jimi Hendrix’s father punished him for being a left-handed guitarist

As Hendrix was born left-handed, he played guitar with his left hand, similar to other rock icons like Paul McCartney and Kurt Cobain. But his left-handedness was a problem for his father, who punished him for using his left hand due to the belief back then that being left-handed was a mark of the devil.

“He was left-handed as a guitarist, as in every other way, and thus in peril of swipes around the head from his father while he sat practicing. So whenever Al appeared, Buster would flip the Kay around and play it upside-down (a trick that his fellow ‘leftie’ and exact contemporary, Paul McCartney, was also having to employ while using John Lennon’s right-handed instrument). Then, instead of the whoopin’, he’d receive a lecture about doing something useful with his life, which to Al, almost a craftsman now with lawn-rollers and secateurs, could only mean working ‘with his hands,'” Norman wrote.

For his part, Hendrix knew that his father didn’t have high hopes for him. “Not that I cared but . . . well, he is my dad,” he said in the Voodoo Child documentary. “I don’t think my dad ever thought I was going to make it. I was the kid who didn’t do the right thing.”