C-G-D-A-E

Those are the chords to Hey Joe. Along with House Of The Rising Sun it’s one of those simple songs that nearly every budding guitarist learns how to play very early in the uphill struggle to rock stardom.

Perhaps the most famous version of Hey Joe is by Jimi Hendrix. It was Jimi’s very first single, recorded as a slow, lazy ballad in late 1966 not long after he arrived in London. But the song has a long and illustrious history going back much further than Hendrix.

It’s thought that Hey Joe was written in 1962 by Billy Roberts, an obscure California-based folk singer, but even that is shrouded in uncertainty.

The Leaves, The Standells, The Surfaris, Love, The Music Machine, and The Byrds all recorded versions before Jimi and the song became an LA garage band standard, in much the same way as Louie, Louie had before it.

The song became so ubiquitous around LA, usually in fast-paced, speeded-up form that perhaps inevitably, Frank Zappa lampooned it as Flower Punk a track from the Mothers’ 1967 album We’re Only In It For The Money. It’s thought that Frank based Flower Punk on The Leaves version » Continue Reading.