“Hey Joe”, the Murder Ballad who changed the rock

It is the peak of the “sacrilegious marriage between popular music and violence” that in the twentieth century is consumed over and over again: it is “Hey Joe”, the Murder Ballad par excellence, the one that has changed Jimi Hendrix’s career and the imagination of rock. The story is told in a new book: “That gun in Your Hand: The Strange Saga of ‘Hey Joe’ and Popular Music’s History of Violence” by Jason Schneider (Anvil Press), with preface by Lenny Kaye.
Schneider reads the song as a key junction of an ancient bond, even more than rock itself: “There is no easy point from which to start examining” Hey Joe “. The 1966 version of Jimi Hendrix remains the definitive one. It was the song that launched his career, the first time he sang in a professional recording studio.” But at the same time it was much more:
As Lenny Kaye, guitarist of the Patti Smith Group and curator of the historic collection of Rock “Nuggets”, recalls in the preface: “I came across the song for the first time when he virmed towards folk-rock, in the years of the garage band. There was always confusion about his autistory authorship, but this did only increase the charm of the mystery, like a yellow novel that investigates a passionate crime. Weigh the killer on the balance of justice.

“Hey Joe” and Murder Ballad

The Murder Ballads are songs that start from the news and transform it into a ballad form. Long before the True Crime podcasts, they transformed real or archetypal crimes into popular story. From the nineteenth -century versions of “Stagger Lee” (then also taken up by Nick Cave) and “Frankie and Johnny” born in St. Louis – one on the shot for a stolen hat, the other on a woman who kills the unfaithful lover – to the twentieth -century rebirth, the shape moves genres and media, up to rock’n’roll.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, pop America has already internalized that imagination: Johnny Cash builds a part of his identity on songs such as “Folsom Prison Blues” (“I Shot a Man in Reno Just To Watch Him Die …”) and “Delia’s Gone”, while the country-western and the electric blues keep the archetype of the archetype Pistolero and the culprit on the run.
“Hey Joe” has a more twisted genealogy than the classic attribution to Billy Roberts suggests. Schneider reconstructs a crucial background: the demo “Baby please Don’t go to Town” by Niela Miller (1962), with the same harmonious movement of fifths that will give “Hey Joe” the feeling of unstoppable escape. Roberts records copyright but does not publish his 45 rpm; In the meantime, Dino Valenti (aka Chester Powers) even manages to deposit a version of the song in June 1966 in his name, fueling the authorial confusion.

From the Los Angeles scene to Folk-Rock

The song circulates in the mid -60s Los Angeles: David Crosby pushes him to the Byrds, without being able to engrave it; Arthur Lee and Bryan Maclean bring him to the loves, who published him in 1966 on Elektra; But it is the Leaves who transform him first success in the standings (n.31 Billboard, July ’66), setting the faster garage bone with a typical R&B bridge.
On the other coast, in the New York village Tim Rose drastically slows down time, replaces “money” with “gun” already on the first verse and brings the text to the crime accomplished: the effect is dark, hypnotic, a real re -foundation in a Murder Ballad key.

Jimi Hendrix, Deep Purple and Patti Smith

It is precisely that version that affects Chas Chandler (ex Animals) in the summer of ’66: he decides that with the right artist “Hey Joe” will be a hit in England. The artist, the next evening at Café Wha?, Is Jimi Hendrix who is already playing the song. Arrived in London, Jimi enters the studio in late October ’66: recorded “Hey Joe” (with “Stone Free” on the back), the first time he sings in a pro study. The interpretation merges the version of the Leaves with the atmosphere of Rose with the Hendrix unique guitar: it is the fuse of his career.
Among the covers that sedated the myth, the Love open the road in 1966: with Bryan Maclean on the item they insert “Hey Joe” in their debut and the initial credit to “Valenti” photographs well as much as they were confused, at the time, the authorial waters. In 1968 the Deep Purple pushed the spectacular side: police siren, an idea almost as a symphonic bolero, then the steering towards “Hush”, to show how the piece could be “hard” without losing its shadow. In 1967 it was up to Cher, who on “With Love, Cher” signed the first female version, modeled on the Hendrixian arrangement and designed to bring the ballad to the riverbed of the Mainstream pop.
At the turn of the ’70s the song enters the soul and guitar circuit. But another masterpiece is linked to the birth of punk:
Patti Smith binds his version of “Hey Joe” to the news of the present: he rewrites the incipit by calling into question Patty Hearst – American heiress kidnapped in 1974 then transformed into a criminal – with several political references. Murder Ballad is no longer just an archetype: it becomes a tool to read the relationship between crime, story and public opinion.
Schneider then dedicates an entire chapter to Nick Cave, who had recorded “Hey Joe” in “Kicking Against the Pricks”, an 1986 cover album and in the 90s he puts his hand back to the tradition of the Murder Ballads with theatrical ferocity: “Stagger Lee” on “Murder Ballads” (1996) is an expanded and cinematographic version of the history of “Stack-O-Lee” Brutally explicit and aware of the myth he updates.

From Folklore to True Crime

In the era of podcasts and TV series, Schneider concludes, “Hey Joe” is the song-ponte in which legend, chronicle and entertainment meet. His progression in circle seems to never end, like escape, says the author: an archetype that combines violence, guilt and destiny, like the story of a murder in the documentary on a video or audio platform. In this sense, the “marriage” between song and violence of which Schneider talks about “Hey Joe” its founding rite within rock culture in “Hey Joe”.