Jimi Hendricks

Essentially Jimi Hendrix was an electric guitar player who could coax sounds out of his guitar in a combination that nobody had really tried before. He could play straight blues music, but then he would usually knock it out with some extremely vivid feedback. He would really bend pitches well beyond their range and play at extreme volume where you get a lot of overtone and lots of feedback. He would get all sorts of extra musical sounds that at the time were not common. A couple of people had explored feedback briefly, but not the way he did. On top of that he was a pretty interesting performer onstage. His songs were pretty well written and it was just the right kind of sounds for the late 60s, flower power kind of thing.