Jimi Hendrix – Little Wing
About The Song
“Little Wing” is a song written by Jimi Hendrix and recorded by the Jimi Hendrix Experience in 1967.
This song was inspired by the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, a concert held during three days of the “Summer of Love” (1967) featuring The Who, The Byrds, Janis Joplin, and many others. Attended by about 200,000 music fans, it happened two years before Woodstock. Jimi wrote about the atmosphere at the festival as if it was a girl. He described the feeling as “Everybody really flying and in a nice mood.” He named it “Little Wing” because he thought it could just fly away.
The guitar on the song is played in a very unique style. Jimi frets the roots of chords with his thumb, and then elaborates on them. It often involves shifts of quartile to tertian harmony and vice versa. In theory it is quite similar to the jazz style of chord melody.
The song is particularly revered among guitar players. Tom Morello wrote in this 2011 tribute to Hendrix in Rolling Stone: “It’s just this gorgeous song that, as a guitar player, you can study your whole life and not get down, never get inside it the way that he does. He seamlessly weaves chords and single-note runs together and uses chord voicings that don’t appear in any music books.”
Hendrix has described this as being one of the few he likes from this album. He said “Little Wing” is “like one of those beautiful girls that come around sometimes.” Hendrix enjoyed writing slow songs because it was easier to put emotion into them.
