Little Wing

Jimi Hendrix learned a lot from Curtis Mayfield, whom he toured with as a support act in 1963. Hendrix said Mayfield probably influenced him more than anyone he had played with to that point. That sweet, understated guitar style turned up in "(My Girl) She's a Fox", which Hendrix recorded in 1966 with the Icemen. His biographer Harry Shapiro called it virtually a blueprint for "Little Wing".

The idea itself came from Greenwich Village in the summer of 1966, when Hendrix fronted Jimmy James and the Blue Flames. He said he finished it after the Experience played the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, where he put everything he saw into the form of a girl who would fly away. The Jimi Hendrix Experience recorded it at Olympic Studios in London in October 1967, for the album Axis: Bold as Love. The first takes, on October 25, were a forceful instrumental. Chas Chandler asked for a different approach, and engineer Eddie Kramer remembered that Hendrix was told to slow down and try again.

Overdubs followed on October 28. Kramer ran the lead guitar through a makeshift Leslie speaker, and Hendrix added a glockenspiel he found lying around Studio A. The vocal was processed to sound airy. It came out in December 1967 in the UK and the next month in the US.