James Marshall 'Jimi' Hendrix (born Johnny Allen Hendrix)

Jimi Hendrix (1942–1970) exploded onto the London music scene in 1966 with the Jimi Hendrix Experience, astonishing Eric Clapton, The Beatles, and The Who with his superhuman mastery of an upside-down, left-handed Fender Stratocaster. Over four meteoric years, Hendrix fundamentally redefined the electric guitar from an instrument into an electronic laboratory of infinite sound.

With albums like Are You Experienced (1967) and Electric Ladyland (1968), Hendrix mastered controlled feedback, fuzz-face distortion, and stereo panning. At the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, he famously set his guitar on fire as a sacrificial offering to music. At Woodstock in 1969, his radical, wailing distortion rendition of 'The Star-Spangled Banner'—mimicking falling bombs, sirens, and screams—became the definitive anti-Vietnam War sonic monument of the 1960s.