Less than thirty thousand people remained on the 600-acre dairy farm in the Catskill Mountains as Jimi Hendrix and his Band of Gypsies took the stage to perform the closing set of the iconic Woodstock music festival. At its peak, the crowd had comprised close to half a million warm bodies enjoying all that their youthful exuberance had to offer them at a pivotal time in American history.
By the end of the two-hour setlist, most of the people who had stayed awake that morning to catch a glimpse of the Voodoo Child were long gone as he began playing the last song heard at the epic 3-day event, where women’s liberation, civil rights activism and the anti-war movement met the consciousness-expanding substrates of LSD, psilocybin and marijuana to create the perfect atmosphere for a celebration of musical artistry and creative freedom.
Striking a dissonant chord from Woodstock’s themes of peace and love, Hendrix chose to perform a murder ballad as his final act. Hey Joe tells the story of a scorned lover, who kills his cheating wife and tries to escape justice by fleeing south of the border. A typical storyline for the sub-genre of the ballad song form, murder ballads hold a special place in American patriarchal culture, often portraying women who pay the ultimate price for defying their assigned gender roles in society.
Perhaps the best-known murder ballad in the world, Hey Joe may also be the most contested piece of music ever written. Appropriately enough, the song’s controversial authorship centers around presumptions of male privilege by the credited songwriter, Billy Roberts, who allegedly stole the song’s unique chord progression and question-answer format of the lyrics from a woman he was dating in the late 1950s, named Niela Miller.
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Miller began her artistic career in the same Catskill Mountains, very near to the town of Woodstock, where the festival’s planners had originally intended to hold the concert before their permit was denied and forced them to move the event next door to Sullivan County. Despite the change of location, organizers kept the name ‘Woodstock’ because of its significance to the American folk music scene.
It was there that the oldest arts and crafts colony in the United States had been established as a reaction to industrialization’s dulling influence on creativity in 1902. Known as the Byrdcliffe Colony, photographer Jane Byrd McCall and her philanthropist husband, together with American painter Bolton Brown and novelist Harvey White, founded a utopian living experiment for artists, that would beget similar enclaves over the following decades and colorful year-round folk festivals.
Young Niela spent a season at Camp Woodland in the 1940s, a fully-integrated summer camp nestled deep in the Catskill Mountains, about 20 miles northwest of the town of Woodstock, where the culture, history, and traditions of the Catskill region were part of the curriculum and culminated with the students putting on performances for the local community.
Folk legend Pete Seeger was a regular sight at the camp, giving music lessons and becoming a mentor to Miller, who’d continue her artistic education at the New York chapter of Antioch College, where she majored in Creative Arts. A few years, Miller was sharing an apartment with a girlfriend in the Bronx when she met Billy Roberts, an itinerant busker from South Carolina, who had just arrived in the big apple.
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William Moses Roberts Jr. saw his father die in a train wreck that left him with a broken leg, permanent back problems and a lifetime of trauma. Bill Roberts Sr. lost his life shielding his 14-year-old son from the tragic collision during a sightseeing trip organized by the National Model Railroad Association convention, which was taking place that September Saturday at the Schroeder Hotel in downtown Milwaukee.
A passionate model train aficionado, Roberts Sr. had left his wife back at the hotel, while he and their only son spent some quality time together enjoying the textile executive’s hobby, before dropping young Billy off in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he was set to start attending an all-boy boarding school later that fall.
But, destiny had other plans and not even the premonitory nightmare of the city’s rapid transit line president, Jay Maeder, could derail them. Maeder, who suffered only minor injuries, made it a point to drive one of the two excursion trains leased for the convention himself after dreaming all night about a train “coming around the curb” over and over again, “maybe 50 times”, until waking up in a sweat.
Nine were killed and fifty hurt in the disaster that changed Billy Roberts’ life and ended Milwaukee’s Interurban train line, for good measure. Six years later, after learning to play the blues from Sonny Terry and the 12-string guitar, he moved to New York City and started strumming for tips at the coffeehouses in Manhattan, where Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Jimi Hendrix, and many others would all get their start.
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Niela was in her junior year of college and Billy didn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. One night at Gerde’s Folk City in the West Village is all it took for the pair to make a connection and by the end of it, Roberts was walking up to Miller’s apartment in the Bronx to stay.
No dating apps, just vibes and a mutual love of music. Soon, she would start teaching him all her songs, including one in particular that really caught Billy’s attention, Baby, Please Don’t Go To Town. Written by Miller before they met, it is the song at the center of the Hey Joe authorship controversy, and if compared side by side to Roberts’ original recording, the similarity is undeniable.
Melodic similitude would not, on its own, constitute anything untoward. After all, music is derivative by nature and Miller herself would concede that fact. It wasn’t merely that her former lover appropriated vast swaths of her original composition to write his own adulterated version that offended her, rather that he never acknowledged or gave her any credit.
When Pete Seeger first heard the plagiarized ditty, he offered to testify in court on behalf of Miller, but the songstress decided to forgo legal action on the advice of her music publisher at the time. A lawsuit was unlikely to prosper anyway, given that Chet Powers, a.k.a. “Dino Valente” – a relatively big name in the industry –, was listed as joint copyright holder of Hey Joe, along with Billy Roberts.
In a certain sense, Roberts got his comeuppance early on for his sneaky behavior by learning through a friend that Powers had laid legal claim over Hey Joe before he did. Forced to negotiate for a piece of it only, Billy Roberts would forever have to split the share of the considerable royalties the song generated.
Picasso’s famous quip that “good artists copy, great artists steal” is borne out by the Hey Joe saga, which continues with its journey across popular culture, passing through the hands of different artists, who try to harness it like a wild horse that everybody recognizes has something special, until it lands on the doorstep of the most prolific creative bandit of them all.
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Arthur Lee, frontman of the L.A. rock band, Love, did not appreciate Jimi Hendrix copying his “dress attire” to create his trademark esthetic – the silk scarfs, hats, and psychedelic dress shirts –, which he had originally crafted for himself as the so-called King Of The Sunset Strip. Nevertheless, he admitted to the fundamental difference in class between his ability to play guitar and the otherworldly genius of the man they would take to calling Black Elvis.
Ironically, Lee was looking for “someone who could sound like Curtis Mayfield” for a session in 1964 when he came across Jimi, who was playing with the Isley Brothers, best-known for their ‘gospel-fired’ version of Twist and Shout that was later covered by the Beatles. The two worked together briefly before Hendrix left for the east coast and landed a regular gig at the storied Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village.
At the time, he was still going by the stage name Jimmy James and was a complete unknown, relatively speaking. For $6 dollars a set, five days a week, Hendrix slowly built an audience at the legendary spot and captured the undivided attention of one person in particular, who would become both the key to his international success and the catalyst of his fate.
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Linda Keith, daughter of noted British stage actor Alan Keith, Vogue fashion model and then girlfriend of Rolling Stones lead guitarist Keith Richards, had become a regular at the Wha?, and was so impressed by Jimi’s talent, that she somehow managed to convince her boyfriend to part with his white Stratocaster indefinitely to let Hendrix use at the Wha?.
Keith became Hendrix’s de facto promoter, dragging friends to witness his brilliant R&B and soul music covers, incredulous that nobody had noticed him before. She often played tour-guide to visitors of the UK rock scene, like Animals bass guitarist Chas Chandler, who came to New York in the summer of 1966 on a mission to find the right artist to cover the song he had chosen to be the ticket to kickstart his music production career: Hey Joe.
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Oddly, the first to release Hey Joe as part of an album was neither Billy Roberts or Chet Powers. That distinction belongs to a garage band called The Leaves, which dropped a version of the song in late 1965, but decided to nix it, only to put out a new version early the following year that flopped in the charts.
A third version of Hey Joe was recorded with new Leaves guitarist Bobby Arlin after a shake up in the band, and released again in May of 1966. The third time was indeed the charm as this surf rock interpretation of Hey Joe became a top-40 hit and is generally considered to be the moment it entered the pop culture zeitgeist.
Other artists soon began to cover it, including Hendrix’s west coast frenemy, Arthur Lee, whose version he reportedly heard on a jukebox at a nearby bar in the Village. However, Hendrix preferred a slower take of the song arranged by Tim Rose, who played just around the corner on Bleaker Street with his folk band, The Big 3.
A marginally famous trio with a number of television appearances under their belt, Rose’s banjo playing was paired with Cass Elliot’s rhythm guitar and her husband’s lead vocals, the eerily-named Jim Hendricks. Their bluesy rendition of Hey Joe at The Bitter End nightclub stuck with the latter’s namesake, who applied his own tweaks and soon incorporated it into his afternoon sets with the Blue Flames at the Wha?.
When Linda brought Chas Chandler to see Hendrix play in the late summer of 1966, he made sure to put Hey Joe at the top of the setlist (probably at Keith’s insistence) and blew the English bassist away. Production on his debut album would begin in October of that same year, after traveling to London and signing with Chandler and Animals’ former manager, Michael Jeffery.
As planned, Hey Joe was released as the album’s first single, climbing to number 6 in the UK Singles Chart in 1967, and starting its ascent into the stratosphere. Since then, the song has been recorded by more than 1,800 artists, making it one of the most covered songs in the annals of rock music and more than earning its status as a rock n’ roll standard.
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The real bitter end came three years after the release of Are You Experienced when Jimi Hendrix’s lifeless body was found just before noon inside his girlfriend’s flat in the Samarkand Hotel in west London, who was nowhere to be found when the paramedics she called arrived on the scene.
Her suspicious absence was just the tip of the iceberg of what remains the unsolved mystery of his untimely death and possible murder, potentially at the hands of his manager Michael Jeffery, who was accused of killing him by a former Hendrix roadie, James “Tappy” Wright, in a 2009 memoir.
Wright claims that Jeffery confessed to the killing scarcely a few months later, telling him that he “had to do it” given Hendrix’s intention to fire him as his manager and leave him in financial ruin. Unconfirmed rumors about the existence of a £1.2 million life insurance policy with Jeffery as beneficiary seem to be the central tenet of this theory, which originated with Wright’s tell-all.
Bob Levine, Hendrix’s U.S.-based agent, refuted Wright’s tale with another alleged confession from the ex-roadie himself, who copped to making it all up to sell books. Tappy felt that it didn’t matter anyway, since everybody was already dead. ”They’re all gone,” Levine says Wright told him, “Nobody can challenge what I write”.
Jeffery would be the first to follow Hendrix into an early grave, after the Iberia jetliner he was on crashed with another aircraft in mid-air, and went down in flames over Nantes, France in 1973, killing everybody on board. According to Jeffery’s father, the music executive was returning from a trip to Palma de Majorca in Spain, where he was planning to convert an old farmhouse into a summer home for himself and his parents.
Whether Jimi Hendrix was the victim of a homicide by a desperately greedy manager with connections to Scotland Yard, which never opened an investigation, or an accidental barbiturate overdose, as most people believe, is incidental in the grand scheme of things. When your time has come to face the music, all escape routes will disappear like magic.
Perhaps this is why there is such a fascination with Hey Joe, a song about a crime most of us would never condone or justify. And yet, we keep hitting the play button over and over again, because it’s not really about the heinous act committed by the murder ballad’s protagonist.
Hey Joe is actually a metaphor about the sense of our own mortality and the torturous guilt we carry from centuries of religious indoctrination, that has instilled a deep-seated self-loathing in us, and brainwashed humanity into believing that each of us are to blame for our ultimate and inescapable fate in this mortal coil.
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Pete Seeger believes that the power of music comes from its “form and design”. It is the artistic structure of a melody combined with the meaning of the lyrics, in the case of songs, that makes music “something you can remember” and “leap over language barriers, and barriers of religion and politics.”
Sting writes that “lyrics and music, have always been mutually dependent, in much the same way as a mannequin and a set of clothes are dependent…”. Together, they create what Seeger calls “musical force”, and which can break into the darkest recesses of our subconscious to soothe the anxiety of existence.
Music, like all artistic activity, is not merely a form of entertainment. It is a critical resource for our survival and part of mankind’s unique creative abilities, that become strongest when faced with the most dire circumstances as Daniel J. Levitin documents in his book The World In Six Songs – How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature, rushing in like the imagination’s anti-bodies to help us persevere through the bleakest moments.
From Niela Miller to Billy Roberts to Jimi Hendrix, and so many others who contributed to the creation of this pop culture phenomenon called Hey Joe, the personal struggles that led each of them to add their grain of sand are part of a mutual yearning, that is embedded in the song and which we share with them and each other every time we listen to it.
Eventually, when enough people manage to overcome the underlying trauma that speaks to us through that fictional fugitive on the run, Joe will lose his popular appeal, and new artists will bring forth other avatars to represent our deepest desires and take us over the next obstacle to our collective, spiritual freedom.
