Credit: Far Out / Press / Bent Rej
Thu 15 October 2026 1:00, UK
Despite originally making their mark as a London band, the Jimi Hendrix Experience only played one show in the UK in the entirety of 1968, as they spent most of the year supporting the Axis: Bold as Love album on the road in America.
Hendrix’s lone swing through England in 1968 was a headline slot on the first night of the Woburn Festival that July, a weekend of music co-headlined by Donovan, the English folk-rock pioneers Pentangle, and a blues-rock double-whammy of Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac and John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers. There were some pretty notable names in smaller typefaces on the Woburn Festival poster, too, including Marc Bolan’s Tyrannosaurus Rex, Roy Harper, Al Stewart, and the trad-folk sisters Shirley and Dolly Collins.
In the same way, the Seattle-born Hendrix had made a pilgrimage to England to properly start his music career in the mid-1960s, the Sussex-born Shirley Collins had made her own journey across the pond in her early 20s, joining the noted folk musician and archivist Alan Lomax on one of his exploratory tours of the American South in 1959. She came back with a much wider perspective on her own music.
Collins had released her first recordings a year earlier, pulling most of her song selections from Cecil Sharp’s English Folk-Songs for Schools, and while her work remained rooted in English folk traditions over the years that followed, she also expanded her palette in daring ways, including an Eastern-tinged jazz-folk fusion record with guitarist Davy Graham in 1964, titled Folk Roots, New Routes.
During a television appearance with Graham, Collins remembers that a producer told her, straight to her face, “I thought you were supposed to be beautiful?”
“No, I never claimed that,” she responded, suffering the first of a few indignities typical of the era. She and Graham were also forced to play ‘House of the Rising Sun’ instead of the track she preferred, ‘Reynardine.’
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“I still feel annoyed to this day that we couldn’t do what we wanted to do!” Collins, now 91, told Uncut back in 2018.
In any case, despite the various other roadblocks thrown up in her path, Collins established a reputation as one of the great voices in the English folk revival of the ‘60s, which in turn would help produce more rock-oriented folk acts such as Pentangle, Fairport Convention, and Nick Drake. Along with her sister, organist Dolly Collins, she was invited to play at the 1968 Woburn Festival, where she’d promote her latest Joe Boyd-produced record, The Power of the True Love Knot.
Collins might have been focused on centuries-old English folk music, but she was a fan of Hendrix at the same time, and recognised the spirit of all sorts of musical traditions in his work. Despite being on the same festival bill as the Experience, though, the Collins sisters were part of the afternoon folk set at Woburn, whereas Hendrix took the stage late that night, playing a set infamously plagued by issues with the band’s sound equipment. As such, their paths never directly crossed.
Fortunately, though, Collins did eventually get her Hendrix moment, and it came not long before the world lost the guitar god forever.
“I met him a couple of years later,” Collins told Uncut. “He came out to the house in Blackheath one day [where Collins lived with her then husband, writer and record producer Austin John Marshall], and he was so utterly charming. He took my daughter Polly on his knee, and I still have this image of her gazing raptly up at his face.
“I saw him once in concert, and I was really worried,” Collins continued. “Because he played his guitar with his teeth – I was thinking, ‘Don’t do that!’”
Collins’s protectiveness was well-placed, if for the wrong specific reason. Hendrix died not long after visiting her, on September 18th, 1970, in London, due to a drug overdose. 56 years later, Collins is still with us, a national treasure with no shortage of great stories.
