He is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential guitarists in the history of popular music. Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in as a part of his band, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the institution describes him as "arguably the greatest instrumentalist in the history of rock music. Born in Seattle , Washington, Hendrix began playing guitar at age In , he enlisted in the US Army, but was discharged the following year.
Soon afterward, he moved to Clarksville , then Nashville , Tennessee, and began playing gigs on the chitlin' circuit , earning a place in the Isley Brothers ' backing band and later with Little Richard , with whom he continued to work through mid He then played with Curtis Knight and the Squires.
Hendrix moved to England in late , after bassist Chas Chandler of the Animals became his manager. His third and final studio album, Electric Ladyland , became his most commercially successful release and his only number one album on the US Billboard chart. The world's highest-paid rock musician, [ 2 ] Hendrix headlined the Woodstock Festival in and the Isle of Wight Festival in He died in London from barbiturate-related asphyxia in September , at the age of Hendrix was inspired by American rock and roll and electric blues.
He favored overdriven amplifiers with high volume and gain , and was instrumental in popularizing the previously undesirable sounds caused by guitar amplifier feedback. He was also one of the first guitarists to make extensive use of tone-altering effects units in mainstream rock, such as fuzz distortion, Octavia , wah-wah , and Uni-Vibe.
He was the first musician to use stereophonic phasing effects in recordings. Holly George-Warren of Rolling Stone commented: "Hendrix pioneered the use of the instrument as an electronic sound source. Players before him had experimented with feedback and distortion, but Hendrix turned those effects and others into a controlled, fluid vocabulary every bit as personal as the blues with which he began.
