The Jimi Hendrix song written about a food fight
The delicate tones of ‘The Wind Cries Mary’ was a different side to Jimi Hendrix. The American guitarist had stormed London at the height of the swinging ‘60s with a combination of charisma, talent, and volume. His instrumental prowess was revolutionary, pushing the boundaries of feedback, distortion, and raunchy rock and roll. But it wasn’t the only style that Hendrix could play.
‘The Wind Cries Mary’ is a delicate ballad with one of the most successful combinations of psychedelia and maturity that Hendrix had ever conjured. Hendrix maintained that the song’s lyrics weren’t about a specific person, but two notable Marys in Hendrix’s life were the main inspiration for the song: his American girlfriend, Mary Washington and his English girlfriend, Kathy Mary Etchingham.
The lines “Somewhere a Queen is weeping / Somewhere a King has no wife” were written by Hendrix when he was still living in Seattle and seeing Washington. After moving to England, Hendrix and Etchingham had gotten into a fight over the state of her mashed potatoes. According to Etchingham, the food fight left pots and pans strewn about Hendrix’s apartment, and in the immediate aftermath, Hendrix finished writing ‘The Wind Cries Mary’.
“We’d had a row over food. Jimi didn’t like lumpy mashed potato,” Ethcingham told Q Magazine in 2013. “There were thrown plates, and I ran off. When I came back the next day, he’d written that song about me. It’s incredibly flattering.”
During the same sessions that produced ‘Fire’ and ‘Purple Haze’, Hendrix showed Mitch Mitchell, Noel Redding, and producer/manager Chas Chandler the basic structure of the song. They elected to record a demo version of the track with the short amount of studio time left. However, the recording wound up being retained as the final take.
“That was recorded at the tail end of the session for ‘Fire’. We had about twenty minutes or so left. I suggested we cut a demo of ‘The Wind Cries Mary’,” Chandler recalled in the book Ultimate Hendrix. “Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding hadn’t heard it, so they were going about it without a rehearsal. They played it once through [and Hendrix then suggested overdubs]. In all, he put on four or five more overdubs, but the whole thing was done in twenty minutes. That was our third single.”
‘The Wind Cries Mary’ was released as a standalone single in the UK, backed by ‘Highway Chile’ in May of 1967. The song peaked at number six on the UK Singles Chart, matching the chart position of ‘Hey Joe’ but failing to top Hendrix’s previous single ‘Purple Haze’, which reached number three. In the US, ‘The Wind Cries Mary’ was the B-side to ‘Purple Haze’, later finding its way onto the US edition of Are You Experienced.
Check out ‘The Wind Cries Mary’ down below.
