Hey Joe is not just a classic, but a genuine rock standard, with at least a hundred versions. This is one of my favourites, by blues guitarist Roy Buchanan.
After I first heard Hey Joe by The Jimi Hendrix Experience I assumed for many years that it was a song he had written for himself. And when I later heard Love‘s very different version, which actually came out a year before Jimi’s in 1966, I didn’t even realise it was the same song.
So when Patti Smith‘s even more different version became her debut single, with an improvised monologue about Patti Hearst, I imagined it was her own work in tribute to her hero.
Wrong on all counts.
Now I hear Roy Buchanan’s live version, recorded live in Austin, Texas, in 1976 and I have a new favourite to add to the list.
The song itself, about the titular Joe who is seen with a gun in his hand planning to “shoot my woman” for her infidelity – then goes on the run to Mexico – has a fascinating and much disputed authorship.
It was first registered for copyright back in 1962 by an unknown singer-songwriter called Billy Roberts, though he was playing the song for years before that and there is much evidence that he assembled it from several other sources.
A Scottish folk singer called Leo Partridge has claimed he helped Roberts write the song when they performed together in Edinburgh folk clubs back in 1956. And there’s a compelling argument that one of the competing sources is a song called Baby, Please Don’t Go To Town – written by his own girlfriend Niela Horn Miller, who recorded it that same year, 1962, though it was not released at the time.
Other possible sources include Boudleaux Bryant’s 1953 old-time country hit Hey Joe! – a hit for Carl Smith in 1953 – and an early 20th century traditional ballad called Little Sadie about a man on the run after he has shot his wife.
At any rate, Roberts was the first to register it for copyright under his own name, though Horn Miller registered her own song the same year – and was supported by folk legend Pete Seeger as at least co-author of Hey Joe.
A year later Roberts’s friend Dino Valenti, who had performed the song with him, registered Hey Joe as his own composition – possibly as a gift Roberts to tide him over financially after his release from jail – though Roberts later brought legal action.
What is thankfully undisputed is that the future rock standard was being widely performed in the early Sixties and was first released as a single in 1965 by a California garage band called The Leaves, and became a minor hit when they re-recorded it the following year – the same year that Love and Hendrix covered the song.
Over subsequent years Hey Joe has been recorded by a diverse range of artists including (deep breath) garage bands The Standells, The Shadows Of Knight, The Surfaris, The Byrds, pre-disco pre-surgery Cher, French superstar Johnny Hallyday, Glasgow’s The Marmalade, early psychedelic Deep Purple, soul legend Wilson Pickett, synthpopsters Soft Cell, solo Robert Plant, French chanteuse Charlotte Gainsbourg and Tim Rose, who copyrighted his folky arrangement (but later admitted he had learned it from another folk singer), plus a parody by Frank Zappa called Flower Punk… and many more.
And you know what? All those versions (except Zappa’s) sound equally good – the hallmark of a great song.