(Credits: Far Out / Marjut Valakivi / Public Domain)
Tue 23 September 2025 18:30, UK
It is easy to forget that Jimi Hendrix was, at his core, an ordinary bloke, rather than a fully-formed rock god sent down from the heavens in order to show us mere mortals the ways of his psychedelic six-string.
After all, there was nobody else who sounded remotely like Hendrix back in his 1960s heyday, thrashing out those expansive psychedelic melodies from a battered and bruised Stratocaster. He blew everybody else away. So much so that the rest of rock’s guitar heroes, including the likes of Eric Clapton or Jimmy Page, then working as a session musician, had to scramble to keep up with the guitarist, often unsuccessfully. Nevertheless, Hendrix was, in essence, indebted to his own range of influences and guitar heroes.
Where would rock and roll be without the humble guitar? Going right back to its earliest R&B origins, the instrument has been the weapon of choice for countless rock and roll revolutionaries, from the otherworldly riffs of Chuck Berry to the endearing abrasion of Link Wray. This was the path that Hendrix chose to follow, too, although one of his key influences stretched back much further than the age of slicked-back hair and high school record hops.
Since its very beginning, rock and roll has been male-dominated, not in the sense that women weren’t making rock music, but in the sense that male artists were the only ones gaining recognition and attention. It is the cause of these misogynistic tendencies that Karen Carpenter’s unparalleled drumming abilities were ignored, and why Big Mama Thornton was never properly given credit for her pioneering rock and roll sound. To an extent, that practice prevails to this very day, particularly in the case of female guitarists.
Admittedly, when you think of rock’s archetypal axemen – including Hendrix himself – they all tend to be men. A key factor in the testosterone-fueled landscape of rock’s prevailing guitar heroes, however, is the simple fact that contributions from figures like Sister Rosetta Tharpe go repeatedly and woefully underrated by the rock mainstream.Â
Tharpe was patient zero for virtually all future rock and roll guitar heroes, and Hendrix was a natural disciple of the gospel performer from a young age. After all, it was her incorporation of the electric guitar into the god-honouring world of gospel music that laid the foundations of Hendrix’s entire career, long before he or any of his male contemporaries had ever laid their fingers on a fretboard.
Thrashing out secular rhythms on her hollow-bodied guitar, in between bursts of traditional gospel, Tharpe was an incredibly individualistic voice when she first hit the airwaves in the late 1930s, and it would take multiple decades before anybody came close to matching her skills. By the time that Hendrix was starting out, during the early 1960s, the Arkansas gospel queen was still going strong, and if you go back and watch some of her performances from that time, her influence on the future Electric Ladyland architect is difficult to ignore.
Despite the fact that figures like Hendrix wouldn’t exist without her, Tharpe’s influence over the rock and roll world has never been afforded the same degree of hero-worship as the various men who followed in her footsteps. Still, Tharpe lives on in the hearts and minds of true rock aficionados everywhere, for without her incredible body of gospel-tinged rock masterpieces, the world might never have been exposed to the expansive psychedelic mastery of Jimi Hendrix.
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