“The Wind Cries Mary” by Jimi Hendrix

"The Wind Cries Mary" finds Jimi Hendrix with the volume down and the heart open, a drifting, blues-tinged ballad he wrote to make peace with Kathy Etchingham, his girlfriend in London. By her account the fight was over a pot of lumpy mashed potatoes, plates got thrown, and Hendrix came back with a song named for her middle name, Mary, with an image of sweeping up the wreckage that she took as a picture of that very night.

Hendrix himself said the song was about more than one person, and the paper trail suggests as much: some of its lines turn up in poetry he'd written back in Seattle, and one also appears in a poem to another former girlfriend, Mary Washington. Billy Cox, his old friend and later bassist, has pointed to Curtis Mayfield as an influence on it.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.