Rich here. I'm guessing any Baby Boomers reading this remember the iconic Sixties song, "Hey Joe." Almost every garage band worth its salt (including my own band) covered "Hey Joe," and dozens of recording artists released their own versions of the song, including some major groups like The Byrds, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and Deep Purple.
"Hey Joe" started out in the early '60s as a somewhat traditional acoustic folk-blues "murder song" narrated from the viewpoint of a jilted lover who vows revenge. Within a year or so of its first recorded version, the song caught on with some of L.A.'s biggest bands of the time, not least because David Crosby introduced it to his band, The Byrds, who were the headlining band at the Whiskey A-Go-Go. The song's popularity with other bands and artists quickly spread beyond the confines of Southern California.
There's a lot of controversy about who actually wrote "Hey Joe." Dino Valenti (aka Chet Powers) of the band Quicksilver Messenger Service claimed he wrote it, as did cult folk artist Tim Rose, but it was first copyrighted by folksinger Billy Roberts, who was also the first artist known to record the song. However, singer/songwriter Niela Miller (who was Billy Roberts' former girlfriend) . . . claimed that Roberts 'stole' the melody and chord progression from her 1955 song "Baby, Please Don't Go to Town." According to Miller, all Billy did was write some new lyrics.
Although the song's popularity seemed to die out in the Seventies, in the Sixties "Hey Joe" was one of the most ubiquitous songs of the era with many artists giving their own unique spins on its arrangement. Here are several distinctive ones:
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