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What songs by The Beatles did Jimi Hendrix cover?

Sun 13 April 2025 20:00, UK

There aren’t many bands that have come out since 1965 that haven’t been influenced by The Beatles in some capacity. As much as people like to think of them as slightly overrated for the sake of being different, it’s hard to deny that most of the things that people take for granted in music today were done by the Fab Four first. And while Jimi Hendrix had been his own unique entity when he crashlanded on British shores in the midst of the Summer of Love, he did have his fair share of favourites from The Beatles whenever he played.

But it’s not like John Lennon and George Harrison didn’t have their fair share of guitar hero moments before Hendrix arrived on the scene. They had been working on some of their most feral guitar tones in 1966 with the release of ‘Paperback Writer’, and even Paul McCartney could get in on the action of guitar hero moments when he grabbed the guitar to play the freakout guitar break in ‘Taxman’.

In fact, one of the biggest trademarks of Hendrix’s style actually came from something The Beatles did first. Despite making the ‘Hendrix chord’ his own at the beginning of the tune ‘Purple Haze’, that 7#9 chord had been a mainstay of the Fab Four’s catalogue, being used in tracks like ‘The Word’ on Rubber Soul and even adding some nice colour to ‘Taxman’ with those punchy stabs in between sections of the verse.

Hendrix may have loved The Beatles’ early years, but not many of their early songs tended to fit his style when he first hooked up with Chas Chandler to put together his own group. What he was making needed to be a lot heavier, and if he was going to do justice to their tunes, he was going to rely on a heavy dose of blues to get through the set.

So which Beatles songs did Jimi Hendrix cover live?

Outside of his recorded output, the most famous Hendrix Beatles cover came when he performed a psychedelic version of ‘Sgt Peppers’ at one of his first major UK gigs. The album hadn’t even been out for a week at that point, but by the time it was in his hands, it was practically an announcement that the Summer of Love was officially underway, as the Flower Children were being born and the streets were soaked with guitar players’ tears.

When he ducked into different sessions to jam, though, Hendrix couldn’t help but throw in different pieces of the band’s repertoire into his set. After all, he always gravitated towards the riffs more than anything else, and a song like ‘Day Tripper’ was no problem for him to get under his fingers since it followed the same kind of bluesy progression that everyone had attached themselves to in the wake of Chuck Berry.

And the love affair didn’t stop once he started jamming on his own tunes. When going back to some of his own tunes, Hendrix would occasionally throw a nod to the Fab Four whenever he could, including some live renditions of ‘Hey Joe’, where certain aficionados could pick out him copping the guitar lick from ‘I Feel Fine’ in between some of his usual spellbinding licks.

But when looking at Hendrix’s cover habits, though, he was never trying to beat The Beatles at their own game by any stretch. He knew that they had some musical superpower whenever they played, but for him, being in the business was all about the idea of sharing music, and by latching onto those few bluesy tones in the band’s vocabulary, he gave the entire a look at what their music sounded like if it were filtered through a musical kaleidoscope.