It is rare in the world of music for a general consensus to form over who was the best at anything. Many would call The Beatles the greatest rock band, but it's easy to find strongly opinionated dissenters. However, when it came to playing a guitar and laying the soundtrack for the psychedelic era, just about everyone agrees there was Jimi Hendrix (1942-1970) and then there was everyone else. Anyone arguing otherwise either never heard his music or saw him perform.

In fact, Jimi Hendrix is one of the few musicians known primarily for his sound and what he could do with a guitar than for his discography. A part of that is due to his untimely death and entry into the 27 Club, but it is also due to the fact that he was so revolutionary with the use of an electric guitar and so skilled at playing it that the effects have largely not been duplicated since. It was heavy, loud, and completely raw, and yet he was a pioneer in genres as varied as blues and heavy metal. As Pete Townshend famously put it, "With Jimi, I didn't have any envy. I never had any sense that I could ever come close."

Ironically, Jimi would later insist that the music that came to him sounded so much better in his head than he was capable of playing that sometimes he didn't even bother grabbing his guitar to try to sound it out. While rock fans can only imagine what it must have sounded like if Jimi didn't feel qualified to play it, they're more than happy with what he did play. When The Jimi Hendrix Experience was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, their award noted that Hendrix "expanded the range and vocabulary of the electric guitar into areas no musician had ever ventured before."