Nobody Wrote Jimi Hendrix's Name on This 1964 Record. Listen to the First Five Seconds.

0:00 Nobody wrote his name down. Not on the session sheet, not on the record label, not on the union card, not on the back of the sleeve, >> [music] >> not anywhere in the paperwork of a small studio in Manhattan on a hot night in the summer of 1964. He sat on a folding chair in the corner, a skinny 21-year-old with a cheap guitar and a cardboard suitcase under the chair, and he was paid the same as the man who carried in the amplifiers. And by the time he walked out of that studio at 4:00 in the morning, he had played something that millions of people would hear on the radio that autumn, that the Rolling Stones would copy a year later, and that people would still be arguing about 60 years afterwards. Did he play it? Or didn't he? Here is how that night went, and at the

0:45 end, you can decide for yourself. New York City, [music] a Thursday in early June 1964, a little after 9:00 at night. The studio was called A1 Sound. It was on the third floor of an old building in Midtown Manhattan, up a flight of stairs that smelled of cigarettes and floor polish. It was not a famous [music] studio. It was the kind of place small record labels rented by the hour when they couldn't afford the big rooms uptown. One room for the musicians, carpet on the walls, egg crate foam on the ceiling. One control room behind a sheet of glass, a tape machine the size of a refrigerator, a radiator that clanked whenever somebody sang a high note, so the engineer had learned to turn it off before every take. And on the wall by

1:31 the door, a hand-lettered sign that said, in capital letters, "No food near the tape," which everybody ignored. And on that Thursday night, a singer named Don Covay had booked it for 3 hours. Don Covay was 28. He was a preacher's son from South Carolina, raised in Washington, D.C., and he had been trying to make it in the music business for nearly 10 years. He had sung in gospel quartets. He had worked as a chauffeur for Little Richard and opened his shows. A skinny kid warming up the crowd before the main act. He had written songs for other people. Some of them had even become hits. Chubby Checker had taken one of them, Pony Time, all the way to number one. But his own records hadn't gone anywhere. Not one.

2:18 He was a good singer. Everybody said so. He had a hoarse, pleading, half-shouted voice, like a man arguing with his own heart. But in 1964, a good voice was not enough. The radio was full of the Beatles. Four months earlier, they had played the Ed Sullivan Show, and American music had turned upside down overnight. Every record label in New York was looking for the next British band. A soul singer from DC with no hits was not what anybody was looking for. So, Don Covay had done what you do when nobody is looking for you. He had scraped together the money himself, with a little help from a small label called Rosemart, and booked 3 hours at A1 Sound to cut a song he believed in.

3:04 It was called Mercy, Mercy. He had written it himself. It was a pleading song. A man begging the woman he loves not to leave, promising to change, asking her to have mercy on him. He had been singing it in clubs for months, and every time he sang it, the room changed. People stopped talking. Couples moved closer together. But in clubs, he could sing it however he felt that night. Fast or slow, loud or soft. In a recording studio, it had to be one thing, and it had to be right. And he had 3 hours and enough money for exactly those 3 hours. If it didn't work tonight, there would not be another night. His band was called the Goodtimers. A

3:50 drummer, a bass player, a saxophone player, a piano player. And because his regular guitarist had taken a better paying job on the road that week, Don had asked around for somebody to fill in. Somebody had told him about a kid. The kid's name was Jimmy. He went by Jimmy James or sometimes Maurice James or sometimes just Jimmy, depending on which band he was playing with that month. He had arrived in New York from Nashville at the start of that year with a guitar, a suitcase, and almost no money. He had played behind the Isley Brothers on a tour of the South. He had played behind half the soul singers on the circuit. He played left-handed on a right-handed guitar turned upside down and people said he could play anything.

4:35 Earlier that year, he had walked up to 125th Street on a Wednesday night and entered the famous amateur contest at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. The one where the crowd booed you off the stage if they didn't like you. He won first prize, $25. He spent most of it on guitar strings and a plate of fried chicken. And the next morning, he was broke again. They also said he was a bit strange, quiet, dreamy, wore odd clothes, showed off sometimes when he shouldn't, and some band leaders had fired him for it. But, he was cheap and he was free that Thursday and he showed up on time. His real name was James Marshall Hendrix. In two years, he would change the spelling of his first name and the whole

5:21 world would know it. In June 1964, he was a sideman. He was paid by the session when he was paid at all. He slept on friends' floors and in cheap hotel rooms on 42nd Street. And some weeks he pawned his guitar to eat and some weeks he got it back. His guitar was a cheap one, an old Dan Electro with a scratched white body. He had got it back out of a pawn shop on 8th Avenue that very morning with almost the last of his money because he couldn't turn up to a session without one. He was the first to arrive that night and he sat on the stairs for 20 minutes before anybody else came, tuning it by ear. Nobody in that room thought he mattered very much. That's important. Hold on to that, because what happened in the next 6

6:08 hours only happened because nobody was paying attention to him. The first hour went badly. They ran the song through four times, and every time something went wrong. The drummer rushed the tempo, the saxophone came in too early, the piano and the bass argued about a chord in the middle, and Don Covay's voice, which was hoarse at the best of times, was in trouble. He had played three shows in 2 days at a club in Newark. He had a cold coming. And Mercy, Mercy was a song that needed everything he had. It started low and pleading, and then, in the chorus, it climbed, >> [music] >> and he had to push his voice right up to the top of its range and hold it there, begging. On the first take, his voice cracked on

6:53 the high note. On the second take, it cracked earlier. On the third take, he stopped singing halfway through the chorus and stood there with his hand on his throat. "Hold it," he said. "Hold it. I'm sorry. Let's go again." In the control room, the engineer, a tired man in his 50s named Saul Rabinowitz, looked at the clock on the wall. Then, he looked at the man from Rosemart Records sitting beside him, a heavy-set man in a short-sleeved shirt who was smoking his fourth cigarette in 40 minutes. "He's got about two good takes left in that throat," Saul said quietly. "Maybe one." The man from Rosemart said nothing. >> [music] >> He just lit his fifth cigarette from the end of the fourth. Through all of this, Jimmy sat on his folding chair in the

7:39 corner of the studio, behind the piano, and played his part. It was not much of a part. Don had given him a few chords on a scrap of paper. "Strum on the two and the four. Stay out of the way." >> [music] >> And he did. He played exactly what he was told, quietly, perfectly in time, with his head down and his eyes half closed. And when the take fell apart, he stopped and waited [music] and said nothing. Nobody looked at him. He was the fill-in. He was the kid who'd borrowed a guitar. But he was listening. The people who played with Jimi Hendrix later, when he was famous, all said the same thing about him. He listened to everything. Not just to the music, to the room, to the way people breathed between lines,

8:26 to the hum of the amplifiers and the traffic outside, and the way a singer's voice changed when he was tired. He heard things other people walked past. And sitting in that corner, through four broken takes, he heard what was wrong. It wasn't the drummer. It wasn't the saxophone. It was that the song had nowhere to start from. It began with the whole band crashing in at once, loud and busy, and Don had to come in over the top of all that noise and immediately start begging. There was no room, no space, no moment for the song to take a breath before it asked for mercy. And so, Don was pushing from the very first line, and by the time he got to the chorus, he had nothing left. Jimmy didn't say anything. He wasn't the

9:13 kind of sideman who said things. He'd been fired twice already that year for showing off, and he needed the money. So, he kept his head down. At 10:00, Saul called a break. 15 minutes. Don Covay went out onto the fire escape with a cup of hot tea with honey and lemon in it, which somebody's girlfriend had run down to the deli to get. The drummer and the bass player went downstairs for cigarettes. The man from Rosemart went to the payphone in the hall to tell somebody [music] in a low voice that this was probably going to be a waste of money. And the studio was empty, except for Saul in the control room changing a tape reel, and the kid in the corner with the borrowed guitar. What happened during that break is something Saul Rabinowitz told the story of for the rest of his life.

9:59 >> [music] >> He told it at bar mitzvahs and retirement parties, and once, years later, [music] to a man from a guitar magazine who didn't believe a word of it. Saul was threading a new reel onto the big tape machine with his back to the glass. The studio was quiet. And then, from the corner, very softly, he heard a guitar. It wasn't the part Don had given the kid. It was something else. It was a little figure, just a few notes, a low note on the thick string, a quick slide up, two notes bouncing off each other, and then a pause. Then, the same thing again, with a tiny change at the end. Then again, lazy and loose and a little bit sly, like a man walking down a street on a

10:45 summer evening with his hands in his pockets, in no hurry to get anywhere. Saul turned round. Through the glass, he could see the kid sitting on his folding chair behind the piano with his old Dan Electro upside down across his knee, playing to [music] nobody. His eyes were shut. His head was nodding slightly. He wasn't playing it for anyone. He was just playing it, the way some people hum when they think nobody is listening. He played it over and over, each time a little different, a note bent here, a beat left out there. Each time, it got a little more relaxed, a little more confident, as if it was working out who it was. And Saul Rabinowitz, who had been recording musicians in rooms like this

11:30 for 25 years, who had recorded jazz bands and polka bands and doo-wop groups and a man who played the saw, felt the hairs stand up on the back of his arms. He didn't say anything. He didn't want to stop it. Instead, very quietly, he reached over and pressed the record button on the tape machine. He would say later that he didn't really know why. It was an old engineer's habit. When something happens in a room that you've never heard before, you put it on tape first and ask questions afterwards. The kid didn't notice. He kept playing. And then, the fire escape door opened, and Don Covey came back in with his cup of tea. He stopped in the doorway. He stood very still and listened with

12:16 the cup halfway to his mouth while the kid in the corner played the little figure three more times with his eyes shut, completely unaware that anybody was there. Then the kid opened his eyes and saw Don standing in the doorway and stopped dead. He went red right up to his hairline. He sat up straight on the folding chair and put his hand flat over the strings to stop them ringing >> [music] >> the way a schoolboy hides a comic book when the teacher walks in. "Sorry, Mr. Covey," he said. "Sorry. I was just just warming up my fingers. I'll play the part. I know the part." Don Covey didn't answer. He walked across the studio slowly and set his tea down on top of the piano. He looked at the kid, then at the

13:01 upside-down guitar. "What was that?" he said. "Nothing," said Jimmy. "Just a thing. Just messing around." "Play it again." Jimmy hesitated. He looked at the door as if he expected the drummer and the bass player to come back at any second and laugh at him. "Go on," said Don. "Play it again." So, Jimmy played it again. Quietly at first, nervously, but then as his fingers found it, it relaxed. The low note, the slide, the two notes bouncing, the pause. Don listened to it with his head on one side. "Again," he said. "Slower." Jimmy played it slower. And Don Covey, standing by the piano with his sore

13:47 throat and his last two good takes, started to sing over it. Not loud, not pushing. He couldn't push. He sang the first line of Mercy, Mercy almost under his breath, low and conversational, as if he was talking to somebody sitting at the end of a bar. And it fit. It fit so well that he stopped after one line and laughed out loud in surprise [music] and then winced because laughing hurt his throat. "You hear that?" he said, turning to the glass. "Saul, do you hear that?" "I hear it," said Saul through the talk back. "I've been hearing it for 5 minutes." Don turned back to the kid. "Where's that from?" he asked. "Whose is it? Is it off a record?" Jimmy shook his head. "It ain't from anywhere," he said. "I

14:34 just I was listening to you all and I thought it starts too loud, the song. Everybody comes in at once and you got nowhere to stand. So I thought what if it started small, just the guitar, like somebody walking up to a door? And then you come in and you ain't got to shout yet because the guitar has already done the knocking." He stopped as if he had said far too much and looked at the floor. "Sorry," he added. "It ain't my business." Don Covay looked at him for a long moment. He had been in the business 10 years. He had seen a lot of sidemen. He had worked for Little Richard, who fired guitar players for wearing the wrong shirt. He knew what it cost a nobody like this kid to say something like that out loud in somebody else's session.

15:20 He knew he could be fired for it. He knew the kid knew it, too. "What's your name again?" Don said. "Jimmy." "Jimmy what?" "Hendrix. Jimmy Hendrix. People call me Jimmy James sometimes." "Well, Jimmy Hendrix," Don said, and he picked up his tea again. "You just made it your business." The rest of the band came back up the stairs a few minutes later, talking and laughing, and found the whole session had changed while they were gone. Don was standing by the piano, explaining. The song wouldn't start with everybody anymore. It would start with the kid. Just the guitar on its own, playing that little figure twice. Then the drums would come in, soft. Then the bass. Then Don. No saxophone until the chorus. No piano

16:07 until the second verse. The saxophone player, a man named Harold who had played on a lot of records, and was not used to waiting for a kid in a borrowed shirt, folded his arms. "Let me get this straight," he said. "You want the fill-in to start the record?" "I want the record to start right," said Don. "He's the one who heard how." "He's been in this room an hour." "Yes," said Don, "and he's the only one of us who's been listening." Nobody said anything after that. In the control room, the man from Rosemart came back from the payphone and found Saul threading tape and Don rearranging the band and a skinny kid in the corner playing the same five notes over and over again while the drummer tried brushes instead of sticks. "What is this?" he said. "What's going

16:53 on? We got an hour and 40 minutes." "We've got an arrangement," said Saul. "We had an arrangement an hour ago." "We had a song an hour ago," said Saul. "Now we've got an arrangement. Sit down, Morty. Have a cigarette. [music] You might want to remember this." "I'll remember it," said Morty, "when I'm explaining to my boss why I paid for 3 hours of a kid playing the same five notes." Saul didn't look up from the tape machine. "Morty," he said, "how long have you been putting out records?" "Six years." "How many of them do people still hum?" Morty opened his mouth and then closed it again and lit another cigarette. Morty from Rosemart did not sit down. He stood behind Saul's chair with his arms crossed watching the clock on the wall.

17:40 Every few minutes he said, "80 minutes" or "75 minutes" in a voice like a man counting down to an execution. They rehearsed it three times. The first time, the drummer came in too early. The second time, the kid played the figure too fast, nervous, rushing. And Don stopped them and walked across the room and put his hand on Jimmy's shoulder. "Don't hurry," he said. "You weren't hurrying when nobody was watching. Play it like nobody's watching." The third time, it worked. >> [music] >> The guitar came in alone. That lazy, sly little walk, twice through. And then the drums, >> [music] >> so soft you almost felt them more than heard them. And then the bass, underneath, like a floor being laid.

18:26 And then Don Covay leaned into the microphone and sang the first line, low and close, almost talking. And his voice didn't strain at all. They played it all the way through. On the chorus, when the saxophone finally came in and the whole band lifted together, Don had enough left. Not much, but enough. He reached for the high note and it held. When it finished, nobody in the room said anything for a few seconds. Then the drummer [music] said, very quietly, "Well damn." In the control room, Morty from Rosemart had stopped counting the minutes. Saul pressed the talkback. "That was a rehearsal," he said. "Please tell me somebody's got another one of those in them, because I wasn't rolling."

19:12 This was not entirely true. Saul had been rolling, but he wanted one more, a better one. He had heard a tiny thing in the third chorus, a bum note on the bass, and he wanted it clean. And Don Covay, standing at the microphone with one hand at his throat, looked at the clock and then at the glass, and then at the kid in the corner. "One more," he said. "I got one more in me. That's all. Make it count." Then he did something nobody expected. He walked across the studio to the corner, crouched down beside the kid's folding chair, and spoke to him quietly so that only Jimmy could hear. >> [music] >> The drummer, who was closest, caught most of it. "When you play it," Don said, "don't look at me. Don't look at the glass.

19:58 Don't look at the clock. You close your eyes like you did before, when you thought we were all outside. You play it for nobody, and I'll come in when it's time. I'll hear it." Jimmy nodded. "And Jimmy," Don added, >> [music] >> "if my voice goes on the chorus, you keep playing. You hear? Whatever happens, you don't stop. If I break, you're the floor I land on." Then he stood up a little stiffly and walked back to the microphone and put his hand on his throat one last time. The take that became the record started at 11 minutes past 11. Everybody who was in that room remembered the time because Morty from Rosemart said it out loud >> [music] >> in a whisper right before Saul pressed the button. 11:11, make a wish.

20:46 The red light came on and in the corner of A1 sound, behind the piano, on a folding chair, a 21-year-old with a cheap Dan Electro in his hands closed his eyes and played five notes to an empty street. Then, he played them again. The drums came in. The bass came in. Don Covay leaned into the microphone and sang to somebody who wasn't there and begged her not to go. Saul said afterwards that he knew in the first 10 seconds. You always know, he said. It's like the moment a plane leaves the runway. One second, you're rolling along the ground and the next second, without any bump at all, you're in the air. And you can feel it in your stomach. The whole band felt it. Harold, the saxophone player, who had

21:32 folded his arms and complained, stood with his horn ready for the chorus with his eyes fixed on the kid in the corner nodding along as if he was the one following now. The drummer was playing so softly in the verses his brushes [music] barely touched the snare. And Don Covay sang the first verse the way he sang it in clubs late at night when the room was half empty and he didn't care who was listening. Easy, close, not pushing at all, saving everything. Then came the chorus. Don's hand went to his throat. Everybody in the control room saw it. Morty from Rosemart put both his hands over his mouth. And Don went for it. His voice climbed. It scraped. It cracked very slightly right

22:17 at the top, a little rough edge on the word, the way a voice cracks when a man is really pleading with somebody. And it held. It didn't break. It cracked and held. And Sol Rabinowitz behind the glass took his hand off the stop button. Because a crack like that, he said afterwards, is not a mistake. A crack like that is the whole song. A man who begs perfectly isn't begging. They played it through to the end. >> [music] >> The last chorus, the fade. The kid in the corner played the little figure one more time as the band dropped out. Alone again. The same five notes walking away down the street. And then he stopped and put his hand over the strings. Silence. Don Covi stood at the microphone with

23:04 his eyes shut, breathing hard. Nobody moved. Nobody wanted to be the first one to break it. Then Sol pressed the talk back and his voice was not quite steady. Dod, he said. That's the one. Don opened his eyes, nodded once, and then, without saying anything, sat down on the floor of the studio, right there by the microphone stand, with his back against the wall, because his legs had gone. The whole band started laughing. Not at him. Just because it was over. And it was good. And they all knew it. And over in the corner, Jimi Hendrix sat on his folding chair with the cheap guitar across his knees and didn't laugh and didn't say anything. He just sat there with a very small smile looking at the strings.

23:52 They cut the B-side after midnight. A quick fast number. And they were packing up by half past three in the morning. While the others were winding cables, Harold, the saxophone player, the one who had folded his arms, >> [music] >> walked over to the corner and stood in front of the kid's folding chair for a moment without saying anything. Jimmy looked up at him warily. He had been told off by a lot of older musicians in a lot of rooms. "How old are you?" Harold said. >> [music] >> "21." Harold nodded slowly. He looked at the upside down Dan Electro. "I've been playing on records since before you were born, he said, "since 1946. And I'm going to tell you something somebody should have told me when I was your age. The people who get remembered ain't always the ones who played the best.

24:38 Mostly, they're the ones whose name was on the sheet." He paused. "So, you get your name on the sheet, son, whatever it takes. You hear me? Don't spend your whole life in the corner." Then, he patted the kid twice on the shoulder, picked up his saxophone case, and went home. Jimmy sat there for a long moment after he'd gone, looking at the door. This is the part of the story that matters most to the people who tell it. The part about the paperwork. In 1964, in a studio like A1 Sound, the engineer kept a session sheet, a form on a clipboard. Date, artist, song titles, take numbers, times, and a list of the musicians who played, so that the union could make sure everybody was paid the

25:24 right rate. Sol went round the room with his clipboard, getting names. The drummer, the bass player, Harold on saxophone, the piano player, all union men, all with their cards. Then, he came to the corner. "Name?" he said. "Jimi Hendrix." "Union card?" Jimmy shook his head. He didn't have one. He couldn't afford the dues. A lot of the sidemen on the chitlin' circuit didn't have one. Sol looked at him over the top of his glasses. >> [music] >> He knew what that meant. If he wrote a non-union guitar player on that sheet, the union would fine the label. Morty from Rosemart, who was already over budget, would have to pay it. And Morty was standing right behind him. "Look, kid," Sol said, not unkindly, "I

26:11 can't put you on the sheet. You understand? It's not personal. Don will pay you cash, $25, same as the others. But, I can't write you down." Jimmy nodded. He didn't seem surprised. "That's all right," he said. "I know how it is." And so, on the session sheet for Mercy, Mercy, on that hot June night in 1964, in the line for guitar, Sol Rabinowitz didn't write a name. He wrote a question mark. Don Covay paid the kid himself at the top of the stairs at a quarter to 4:00 in the morning, $25 in $5 bills out of his own pocket. And then he held onto the kid's hand for a moment after the money had changed hands. "Jimmy," he said, "that thing you

26:57 played, that's yours. You know that, right? Whatever it says on the record, I know it, and Sol knows it, and the band knows it." Jimmy put the money in his pocket. "It's your song, Mr. Covay," he said. "I just knocked on the door." He picked up his cardboard suitcase and his Dan Electro and walked down the stairs and out into the empty street. It was getting light over the East River. He walked 40 blocks to an all-night diner on 8th Avenue and spent a dollar and 10 cents of his 25 on the biggest breakfast on the menu. The counterman, an old man named Abe who knew him by now, looked at the plate and then at the kid's face. "Good night," Abe said. Jimmy thought about it. "Yeah," he said.

27:42 "I think I knocked on a door." Abe had no idea what that meant. He just poured the coffee. That was the night. The record came out that summer. Don Covay and the Goodtimers, Mercy Mercy. Rosemart Records with Atlantic distributing it. It started slowly, a few soul stations in the South, then New York, then Chicago. By the autumn, it was all over black radio across America, and it climbed onto the pop chart, too, into the top 40. It was [music] the biggest hit Don Covay had ever had as a singer. After 10 years of trying, people finally knew his name. And every time it came on the radio, it started the same way, five notes on a guitar, alone, lazy and loose and a

28:30 little bit sly, like somebody walking up to a door. In the autumn of 1964, Jimmy Hendrix was in Nashville, then Atlanta, [music] then on a bus somewhere in Tennessee, playing behind whoever would pay him. He heard Mercy, Mercy for the first time on the radio in a diner in Atlanta at 2:00 in the morning after a show. The waitress turned it up because she liked it. The guitarist sitting next to him in the booth, another sideman on the same tour, started nodding along to the intro. "Man," he said, >> [music] >> "who plays that? That's slick. That cat can play." Jimmy didn't say anything. >> [music] >> He just kept eating his eggs. He had learned by then that nobody believed you anyway. A year later, in 1965,

29:16 a young English band recorded Mercy, Mercy for their new album. They followed Don Covay's record closely, the pleading voice, the slow build, and a guitar figure at the start built on that same lazy, sly little walk. The band was the Rolling Stones. The album was Out of Our Heads. And for years afterwards, people who wrote about Mick Jagger would point to Don Covay as one of the singers he learned the most from. So, by the end of 1965, those five notes had been heard by millions of people on two continents. They were on the radio in London, and Los Angeles, and Tokyo. And the kid who played them first was sleeping on a friend's floor on West 45th Street and counting coins for the rent, >> [music] >> and wondering if he would ever get to

30:02 play his own music in front of anybody at all. Then, in the summer of 1966, everything changed. A big Englishman named Chas Chandler heard Jimmy play in a little basement club in Greenwich Village and took him to London. Within weeks, he had a new band, a new name, and a new spelling. Jimmy became Jimi, and within a year, [music] Jimi Hendrix was the most talked about guitar player in the world. He never stopped being asked where his sound came from, and he always answered generously. He talked about Muddy Waters and B.B. King and Albert King. He talked about the years on the Chitlin' Circuit behind the Isley Brothers and Little Richard. He talked about learning to play on a broom and a one-string ukulele in Seattle.

30:48 But, he almost never talked about the records he played on as a sideman. Not by name, not in detail. When reporters asked, he would smile and say he'd played on a lot of things for a lot of people, and most of them didn't put his name on, and that was just how it was. There is one story told by an English journalist who interviewed him in a hotel bar in London in the spring of 1967 that people who love this record like to repeat. The journalist had a list of old American soul records. He'd heard rumors that the new star had played on some of them. He read the titles out one at a time, and Jimmy either nodded or shook his head. Then, he got to "Mercy, Mercy". Jimmy didn't nod, and he didn't shake his head. He just picked up his drink

31:33 and looked at it for a moment and smiled a slow, private smile. The one his friends said he wore when he was remembering something he didn't want to share. "Man", he said finally, "that's a beautiful record. Don Covay is a beautiful singer." "But, did you play on it?" Jimmy shrugged. >> [music] >> "Somebody did", he said. "Somebody knocked on the door." And that's all he ever said about it. Don Covay said more. Over the years, in interviews, he would sometimes say that the guitar player on "Mercy, Mercy" was a young kid named Jimi Hendrix, who nobody knew at the time. Other times, he would just laugh and say there were a lot of guitar players in New York in 1964, and he couldn't remember every one of them.

32:18 He went on to a long career. He wrote "Chain of Fools" for Aretha Franklin and songs for Gladys Knight and Steppenwolf and many others. Musicians who worked with him called him one of the great unsung writers of soul music. A man whose fingerprints were on more records than he ever got credit for. Which is, when you think about it, the same thing people say about the kid in the corner. And Sol Rabinowitz? He kept recording in small rooms in New York until the mid-1970s. And whenever a young musician asked him about the old days, he would tell them about a hot night in June 1964 and a session that was going nowhere and a kid with a cheap guitar who played five notes to himself in a corner while everybody else was out having a cigarette.

33:04 "I wrote a question mark on that sheet," he would say, [music] "because I couldn't write his name. And you know what? That question mark has been on the radio for 50 years." So, did he play it? Some music historians say yes. They point to the date and the timing and the fact that Jimmy was a session man in New York that summer. They point to the playing itself and to that loose, sliding, behind-the-beat feel that sounds like nobody else in 1964 and like Jimi Hendrix a few years later. Others say the evidence is thin and the memories are fuzzy and that half the young guitar players in New York could have played it. The session paperwork, whatever it said, has never been found. So, nobody knows for certain, not really. But you can still hear the

33:50 record. It's easy to find. And if you listen to the first five seconds, before the drums come in, before the bass, before Don Covey starts to beg, you'll hear a guitar on its own, walking slowly up to a door. You can decide for yourself who's knocking. There's one more small thing. In early 1967, in a crowded club in London called the Scotch of St. James, somebody put the Rolling Stones version of Mercy, Mercy on the record player late at night. Jimmy was sitting at a corner table with Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell, his new bandmates. When the guitar intro came on, Noel said later, Jimmy stopped talking in the middle of a sentence, closed his eyes, and played the five notes on the edge of the table with his

34:35 fingertips, perfectly in time. Noel asked him what was so funny. Jimmy just shook his head and said, "Nothing, man. Just an old friend." The real history behind this story is the history of a whole generation of musicians whose names were never written down. In the 1950s and 1960s, most popular records in America were not played by the people whose names were on the label. They were played by session musicians. In Detroit, [music] Motown's house band, later known as the Funk Brothers, played, as the famous claim goes, on more number one hits than the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Elvis Presley put together. And for years, their names didn't appear anywhere on the records. In Los Angeles, a loose group of studio

35:21 players, later nicknamed the Wrecking Crew, played on hundreds of hits by artists who got all the credit. Their stories only came out decades later in books and documentaries when many of them were already old men. Jimi Hendrix was part of that world, too. Between 1962 and 1966, before anybody knew his name, >> [music] >> he played behind the Isley Brothers, Little Richard, Curtis Knight, King Curtis, and many others. He played on dozens of recordings as a sideman, and for some of them, nobody is completely sure which parts are his. Don Covay's "Mercy, Mercy", released in 1964 and covered by the Rolling Stones the following year, is one of the records most often linked to his name. Collectors and historians are still

36:08 debating it today. What this story shows about Jimmy is something that's easy to forget when you think of the burning guitars and the headlines. Before any of that, [music] he spent years being the most talented person in rooms where nobody was looking at him. He learned to listen. He learned to serve somebody else's song. And sometimes, maybe, he handed a better idea to a singer who needed it and walked out without his name on anything. Most of us know what that's like. The idea you gave in a meeting that somebody else presented. The work you did that ended up under another person's name. The thing you fixed that nobody ever knew was broken. It can feel unfair and sometimes it is unfair. But it is also very often how

36:54 good things get made by people in corners paying attention. And there's another lesson hidden in that night, maybe a more important one. It wasn't only the kid who did something good, it was the singer who heard him. Don Covey could have told the fill-in to stick to his part. Plenty of band leaders would have. Instead, [music] he stopped, listened, and let the least important person in the room change his song. Great work often needs two people like that. One who notices and one who is willing to be noticed by. So here's our question for you today. Have you ever done something important that nobody gave you credit for? And looking back now, did it matter to you or were you just glad it got done? Tell us below. And if you'd like to hear more

37:40 stories from the parts of music history that never made it onto the label, you'll find them here.