 This video is brought to you by CuriosityStream. If you sign up to CuriosityStream with the link in the description, you'll also get access to Nebula where you can see this video and all of my videos the way they were meant to be seen. We're going to try something new with this video. This is another audiovisual companion where the song is meant to play in its entirety below the video. Unfortunately, The Hendrix Estate is famously aggressive when it comes to blocking the use of their songs on YouTube. So if you want to see the full video with the song as I edited it and hoped it will be seen, you can go over to Nebula. If you want to stay here, we're going to try to make this interactive. What I want you to do is go to your favorite streaming service or dig through your record collection and find Electric Lady Land. Get Track 4 Voodoo Child ready to play and keep an eye out in the top corner here because I'm going to give you a countdown a few seconds into the video. Hopefully if you time it right, things will sync up and your music will be paired with the video. I'm really sorry that it has to be this way. I was pretty proud of this video and I'm bummed that you all don't get to see it as it was meant to be seen, but hopefully either synced up or with patches of silence, you'll still enjoy this video and you'll still learn something because I put a lot of work into it. So let's begin and remember to keep an eye out for that countdown. There has never been and never will be a musician quite like Jimi Hendrix. In a recording career that lasted just five years, he was able to completely transform rock music and even change the way that we understood the guitar as an instrument. But it was more than just his playing. Throughout his life, Hendrix cultivated an image of himself as someone strange, cosmic, profound, someone born with a faded destiny and imbued with a special sort of psychedelic witchcraft. Three quarters of the first side of Electric Ladyland are made up of one song, Voodoo Child. The name Spelling is an approximation of how Hendrix himself pronounces Voodoo Child and this spelling separates it from another masterpiece that appears later on the same album, Voodoo Child's Slight Return. But for all the love that Slight Return gets, I think that the jam that birthed it is just as much a display of everything that makes Hendrix so magical. A structured 15 minute jam, Voodoo Child seems to be an autobiography of sorts, both of the genre of psychedelic blues and of the man who perfected it. In the first verse of Voodoo Child, Hendrix is creating a mystical origin myth about the night of his birth. But this myth isn't something he came up with on his own. The verse pulls heavily from Hoochie Coochie Man, a classic song originally written by the legendary Chicago blues man, Willie Dixon, and famously recorded by the inimitable Muddy Waters. In the Great Blues tradition, Hendrix adapts Dixon's words and puts his own heritage into them, specifically his Cherokee roots. Hendrix's grandmother was Cherokee and that history impacted a lot of Hendrix's identity, especially when it came to his music and his personal style. The eagle is one of the most important animals in Cherokee spirituality and cultural practice. It represents courage and power, and in Cherokee culture, eagle feathers are given to mark significant life events like coming of age. In Voodoo Child, the eagle seems to represent a transitional point as well, taking Hendrix from his birth and flying him outward into the cosmic psychedelic beyond. After finishing with a declaration of his supernatural origin story, Hendrix lets the music swell, tears out fuzzy guitar licks, and gives the listeners a triumphant declaration of who he truly is. There's a reason why Voodoo is Hendrix's magic of choice. Voodoo and the Blues have a long history together. Both were born from the African diaspora brought on by the slave trade, and both mix aspects of traditional West African cultures and European folk practices. In fact, some of the earliest blues men like the legendary Robert Johnson sang about Voodoo practice in their music just as Hendrix would generations later. And in the second verse, Hendrix taps into another essential part of the blues tradition. The blues has always been overtly sexual music. Dating back to the early greats like Robert Johnson, Sunhouse, and Bessie Smith, blues has dealt in sultry, graphic, and often raunchy depictions of carnal acts. And when Muddy Waters picked up the torch from the Delta Blues greats, he brought the tradition into his own electrified Chicago blues. But this was more than just sex for the sake of sex. I think the sexuality of the blues is an act of empowerment. The blues came of age in a segregated society, and one whose mainstream depicted black bodies as grotesque, monstrous caricatures. When musicians like Waters established themselves as sex symbols, it was a rejection of the way white society wanted black bodies to be seen. And Hendrix himself was just as much of a sex symbol as any other blues man. But in Hendrix, the raw sexuality of the blues mixed with a new kind of emergent eroticism, that of the sexual revolution. Hendrix was living in a world where the ideas of what sex could be were fast changing. He became an icon in a time of free love. Revolutionaries were pushing for more widespread recognition of interracial relationships, queer relationships, and generally just breaking down stodgy old sexual norms. And Voodoo Child brings the blues into this sexual revolution with a new cosmic spiritual spin on blues sexuality. To create the sound for this melding of world, Hendrix turned to some of his psychedelic contemporaries. The bass on Voodoo Child is played by Jefferson Airplane's Jack Cassidy, and one of the highlights of the song is a wild electric organ solo by traffic Steve Wynwood. But while the song might just seem like a straight jam, Cassidy told Uncut Magazine that wasn't the case. It wasn't as simple as a jam. There was a full structure to the song, so it was an extended song that you were able to improvise in. We took directions through the language of the playing. Still, Hendrix wanted the song to have a sound of spontaneity to it. It was meant to sound like the kind of late night jam that Hendrix would frequently join in on when he lived in New York. And the song was actually recorded after one such jam at a club in New York called The Scene. After playing into the early hours of the morning, Hendrix brought Cassidy and Wynwood along with a small audience of musicians and friends back to the studio. They tore out Voodoo Child in just three takes, and later Hendrix recorded his audience making crowd sounds to hammer home the live feel. As much as the guests add to the song, Voodoo Child is still Hendrix through and through. In the third verse, Hendrix pulls on his science fiction influence to travel to other worlds. By now we're deep into Hendrix's psychedelic sound painting, something Cassidy sung praises of and uncut. Jimmy was able to experiment with his ability and with effects in order to create an atmosphere. Voodoo Child has a really eerie sound that kind of places you in a different world. One of the biggest reasons why Hendrix's guitar is so singular was his mastery of tone. Throughout his career, Hendrix would become famous for his use of distortion pedals to create unique sounds. Probably the most well-known pedal in Hendrix's arsenal was the Arbiter Fuzzface. But the Fuzzface was a cheap pedal and different copies of it could sound different, so the meticulous Hendrix would often buy upward of 20 pedals looking to find the perfect tone. And this perfectionism pays off in Voodoo Child, a song with impeccable guitar tone from start to finish. But the tone on Voodoo Child wasn't solely a product of pedals. Hendrix's guitar tech Roger Mayer explained the complex techniques that he and Hendrix would use to elevate the sound in studio. In the studio you can vary the voltage you're running the Fuzzface on, so we had much more control. I'd put different buffers with different equalization in front of them to drive the actual Fuzzface from a low impedance source rather than the high impedance of the guitar. Then we'd add the distortion after that with pre EQ. Then we could also fuzz the device with post EQ. You're not going to get that tone Jimi Hendrix got on the record with a simple device. Beneath Hendrix's fat guitar tones, Voodoo Child is carried by the steady rhythms of Mitch Mitchell, who gets to display his chops with an extended drum solo laid in the song. Mitchell came from a jazz background inspired by the legendary Elvin Jones who played with John Coltrane. And Hendrix and Mitchell have the same kind of inherent chemistry that made Coltrane and Jones flourish. By the end of Mitchell's solo, we can see Coltrane's ethos of extended experimentation working its way into Voodoo Child. The song swirls into a strange soundscape propelled by near ambient tones from Hendrix and an organ line by Windwood that almost seems to be pulled from his British folk heritage. We've transformed the 12 bar blues that opened the song into a fully experimental jazz influenced masterpiece of psychedelia. This transformation is reflective of the transformations that Hendrix went through as an artist and as a person. Hendrix began his career in America playing as a sideman for Soul in Blues acts, but he really took off when he went across the Atlantic just as the UK was exploding into a psychedelic hotbed. And by mixing these two influences together, Hendrix became the figurehead of a legendary psychedelic blues scene. And as Voodoo Child's psychedelic jam subsides, Hendrix brings those blues back. For me, this section has always felt the most like what Hendrix set out to depict. A half empty club late at night, smoke in the air and tipsy conversation permeating every corner, while musicians get up on stage and play not for praise or acclaim, but for the sheer love of the blues. Yet even as Hendrix puts us in the club, the magic of his sound also brings us to new surreal worlds. The lyrics of this verse seem to pull from one of Hendrix's favorites, Bob Dylan. Rather than being concrete, they're abstract and strange, less about conveying meaning and more about evoking a sensation in the listener, bringing you along with Hendrix into this realm of mystic eroticism. And with one final swell, Hendrix once again proclaims his powers. Hendrix is a Voodoo Child, one born from the early days of blues and one who has grown into an otherworldly being imbued with the musical powers of enchantment. Music came so naturally to Hendrix that he was able to evolve Voodoo Child into an entirely new song when put on the spot. Voodoo Child's slight return spun off from its predecessor when an ABC film crew came in to document him and asked for footage that looked like he was playing. Rather than fake it, Hendrix told his band to play Voodoo Child in E and improvised what became an entirely new song and one that is a monumental achievement in its own right. And that's the magic of Hendrix. Everything that he touched in his tragically short life seemed to turn to gold. Through a mixture of raw talent, pure passion, and perfectionist dedication, he was able to establish himself as an artist who truly has no equal. And Voodoo Child is the living embodiment of this on all fronts, one of the centerpieces of the final studio album of Hendrix's career. In its final moments, the song explodes into pure chaos with Hendrix wailing out feedback and Mitchell descending into pure cacophony. By the time the chaos fades to a din, you're left breathless and in awe of an artist who pushed the blues, who pushed all music to places it had never been before and will never go again. And an artist who truly lives up to his self-appointed title, a Voodoo Child. If you're a fan of Hendrix, there's a good chance you're a bit of a guitar nerd, so you might want to check out Curious Mind's Paul Reed Smith on Curiosity Stream. In that series, famed guitar maker Paul Reed Smith explores the instrument that we all love so much. He looks at its history, some of his favorite players, and shows how guitar makers are trying to push guitar technology to new frontiers. And of course, there's lots more where that came from on Curiosity Stream. Another documentary I'd recommend is Rise, the story of Augustines, which tells the tale of an indie band fighting their way through strange and tragic situations to rise and perform once more. If you want to check these and more documentaries out, go to the link in the description. Following that link will not only give you access to thousands of documentaries, it'll also get you access to Nebula. Nebula is the streaming platform created by and for creators like myself. And one of the great things about Nebula is that it actually respects fair use, so the video you just watched is up there with the music behind it. Not only that, everything I make drops early on Nebula and is also completely ad-free. Nebula is really important for me personally and really for all sorts of indie content on the internet. If you want to support it, get started today by going to curiositystream.com slash polyphonic. That'll get you 26% off an annual subscription to Curiosity Stream, which comes with full access to Nebula. That means for less than 15 bucks a year, you can access so much content and you can really help support independent creators like myself. Thank you all so much for watching.