The Wind Cries "Mary"

This may be the one Jimi Hendrix song that I like.  He did a fantastic version of Bob Dylan's "All Along The Watchtower" but that's for another day.  As I wrote a few years ago, the hippie movement displayed an evanescent and haunted sense of spiritual despair -- because that was underlying the culture of the day.  What could anyone say about today?

Chas Chandler, Jimi's manager, says this song was thrown together late at night when he told Jimi they had about twenty more minutes of recording tape left and Chas wondered if Jimi had any other song fragments to work on.  Jimi quickly laid down several guitar parts for this song.  I don't know if the lyrics came first or later but they're quite poetic and fairly surrealistic.  To me, it's obvious that when the wind cries "Mary," it's equivalent to asking for mercy.  The spiritual desperation of which I spoke.  I quote the lyrics below even though they're not sung on this rendition by Jamie Harrison.

I chose this cover because I like this guy's sense of touch.  He's not simply playing the notes that Jimi played; he's capturing the feel of Jimi's playing.  For instance, near the end of the song, he spontaneously riffs in a way that is reminiscent of Hendrix but isn't a copy of the record -- it's Harrison inspired by Hendrix and paying homage to the song in his own way.  I like that.  Takes balls to pull it off.    

The original rendition of Jimi's follows this.  Here goes:

After all the jacks are in their boxes

And the clowns have all gone to bed

You can hear happiness staggering on down the street

Footprints dressed in red

And the wind whispers, "Mary"

A broom is drearily sweeping

Up the broken pieces of yesterday's life

Somewhere a queen is weeping

Somewhere a king has no wife

And the wind cries, "Mary"

The traffic lights, they turn blue tomorrow

And shine their emptiness down on my bed

The tiny island sags downstream

Cause the life it lived is dead 

And the wind screams, "Mary"

Will the wind ever remember

The names it has blown in the past

With its crutch, its old age, and its wisdom

It whispers, "No, this will be the last"

And the wind cries "Mary"