Star Spangled Miracle at Woodstock: How Jimi Hendrix Re-Wrote U.S. History
Peter Meyer Filardo copyright 01 August 2021
On Monday morning August 19, 1969, a handsome young African American (and also a person of Indigenous descent), well versed in pulp science fiction and psychedelic drugs, walked onto the stage at the Woodstock music festival, and with his transcendent performance there of the Star-Spangled Banner, made musical and social history. He was, of course, that volcanic genius, Jimi Hendrix. Clothed partially in the manner of a Native American of the Great Plains — including a shirt with beaded fringes — and with his long arms spread wide, Hendrix looked like an eagle about to take flight. He was greeted by an enthusiastic crowd of some 30,000; a remnant tenth of the festival’s attendees, spread across a muddy field of rubbish. Woodstock was the high tide mark of the psychedelics-influenced youth culture, enacting the ideal of the “beloved community” that hopefully would ripple outwards to transform society as a whole. Jimi Hendrix, as its closing performer, would have a good platform from which to recapitulate and project the Woodstock ethos into the wider culture.
At the end of Hendrix’s hour-long set, he told the audience that “they could leave now, we’re just jamming,” a colossal understatement. Hendrix then signaled to his band to fall silent. He then repeated, with variations and special effects, his famous Voodoo Chile riff.
Then, suddenly, there is a downward arpeggio, followed by a chord sliding high up the neck of the guitar, where it is sustained, and provokes a sense of exhilaration and expectation that brings the audience to its feet. Hendrix then proceeds directly into the Star-Spangled Banner, played at a moderate free tempo, not at the customarily brisk tempo of a military band. While staying largely faithful to the melodic line, Hendrix makes tasteful use of Baroque ornamentation, including a complex trill and turn to emphatically end the second verse. The mood thus far is celebratory, even euphoric.
However, it is for the first two lines of the third verse, with its two violent improvisations, that this performance is most widely known. (“And the rockets’ red glare,” followed by a 30 second improvisation; then “The bombs bursting in air,” followed by a 40 second improvisation.)
The first improvisation, with its rapidly clashing dissonant chords, suggesting the sound of small arms fire, interspersed with wailing notes evoking the screams of the wounded and dying, suggests an eye-witness view of a Vietnam War platoon-level firefight or perhaps, the chaos of an urban riot of that era. Taking a broader historical view, this improvisation can be seen as a representation of an “up close and personal” view of any given episode of strife in U.S. history.
The second improvisation, also begins with rapidly contrasting dissonant chords, followed by descending arpeggios, both of which lack the clear sense of being in any particular musical key; thus dissociative and disorienting, as if the ground were dissolving beneath one’s feet. This is followed by perhaps the most famous passage of all (effected with the use of his guitar’s “Whammy Bar”): the several sequences of continuously descending chords, evoking the sounds of bombs repeatedly falling, as if from a B52, flying high over Vietnam.
This wide-angled bird’s-eye view is not only suggestive visually, but chronologically. The repeated sequences that produce the aural image of bombs falling are also suggestive of the long waves of struggle and violence that have shaped U.S. history. Not only the Vietnam War, but the Civil War, the labor struggles of the Gilded Age and New Deal eras, the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s-60s, and the youth, countercultural and the feminist movements, the environmental movement, the LGBTQ movement, etc.
Thus, in this brief interval, Jimi Hendrix, albeit unconsciously, has rewritten the arc of U.S. history, until then largely viewed as a linear trail moving from triumph to triumph, replacing it with a more complex story of ongoing struggle against oppression and for new rights and freedoms. As an African American (and part Indigenous American), Hendrix was likely to be more attuned to this view of U.S. history, then largely absent from public consciousness. This may not have been Hendrix’s conscious intent, but rather his intuition, and great works of art are capable of supporting multiple readings. Without this broad perspective, we fail to see the full nature of his genius and achievement at Woodstock. In four brief minutes, Hendrix had essentially foreseen the radical essence of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980).
Zinn’s book, updated frequently, has never been out of print, even following the author’s death in 1910. Unlike previous histories that had focused on national politics and their leading personalities, Zinn’s book is a history “from below,” emphasizing the crucial importance of working people, women and people of color, their daily lives, and their struggles for justice.
In a similar manner, Afro-Futurism and the Black Arts Movement and the rising Black consciousness movement all challenged and reversed hierarchies of power and valuation, imaginatively and through social action. On an international scale, the literary form magic realism acted similarly. Hendrix falls squarely within these traditions.
While contemporary commentators, and more recent scholars unanimously assumed the references to the Vietnam War, but to my knowledge, no one, then or since, has made the imaginative leap to the understanding that this performance referred not only to the present moment but looked backward over the arc of U.S. history until then, and forward, towards the hoped-for achievement of communal peace, and freedom and justice. However, as Daniel Barenboim, conductor and pianist once said, “great music has two faces, one facing the present, the other looking out onto eternity.”
In any case, we are not yet at the conclusion of this performance, and Hendrix is not through with his historical allusions. At the end of the third verse’s last line (“That our flag was still there”), Hendrix plays the opening half of “Taps,” the Civil War bugle call that memorializes those who died in strife, past and present, civil and military.
Then, at the end of the next and penultimate line (“O’er the land of the free”), he holds the chord representing the word “free” for a full twelve seconds, during which all the lower notes of the chord drop away, one by one, leaving one screaming high note, followed by three seconds of deafening silence. The illusion is of being rocketed into space; the allusion calls to mind the successful Apollo moon landing a month prior.
Finally, Hendrix slides all the way down the guitar neck to the concluding line (“And the home of the brave”), followed by a triumphal flourish, and then directly into “Purple Haze.”
Hendrix’s performance, though non-traditional, was actually a patriotic one, ranging from opening grandeur, to the sounds of conflict, to an affirmative conclusion. However it was widely viewed as subversive of traditional performance practice for the national anthems: its alleged lack of reverence for tradition, the wildly screaming guitar expressing an extreme range of emotions, to its explicit critique of the Vietnam War, and subconsciously, to its unvarnished view of the history of the U.S.
The passion of Hendrix’s performance of the Star-Spangled banner was fueled by his profoundly utopian view of the potentiality of music, evident in his words “Music doesn’t lie. If there is something to be changed in this world, then it can only happen with music.”
Jimi Hendrix’s Star-Spangled Banner would have been perfectly appropriate for the historic inauguration of President Barack Obama. Perhaps someday, it will be used to mark the inauguration of a U.S. President, one deserving of this critically patriotic work of genius.
Link to a video of Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock performance of the Star-Spangled Banner.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKAwPA14Ni4)
[1] Peter Meyer Filardo is an independent scholar who, from 1989-2012, was an archivist at the Tamiment Library, NYU, where he curated collections that documented progressive social movements. He may be reached at: (filardop@gmail.com)
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