Foxey Lady

The Zoo Crew has got the needle down on a real stalker of a record, the kind that walks into the room before the singer does. “Foxey Lady,” the way the American pressings spelled it, is The Jimi Hendrix Experience opening the door on Are You Experienced and daring the whole room to keep up. Over on the British album the title went down as “Foxy Lady,” and it sat right at the front of the running order when Track Records put the record out in May 1967. The Reprise version that hit the States shuffled the deck, but the song still bit the same way. If you are riding with the Zoo Freaks on THE ZOO, you already know the difference between a cute little heartbreaker and a song that means it.

The track was cut in London while the band was still brand new and the Marshalls were still a shock to the engineers. Official session notes from the Hendrix family put the main work on Tuesday, December 13, 1966, at CBS Studios, with Chas Chandler producing and Mike Ross at the board. Ross has told the story more than once. Hendrix rolled in with four Marshall cabinets, which the engineer could hardly believe. Jimi told him to stick a microphone about eight feet back from the stack and it would sound great, then walked over and showed him the spot. Ross parked a Neumann U-67 right where he was told. Mitch Mitchell wanted every tom miked on its own, the way he had liked it at another session. The basic track went down after a run of rehearsals. The lead vocal was not live. Ross overdubbed Jimi’s voice, then stacked backing vocals from Mitch, Noel Redding, and Hendrix himself, plus a second guitar. A rough mix followed two days later, still at CBS, with Mitchell out of the room. Chandler liked the room better than De Lane Lea, then got into a money argument with the studio and never booked it again.

They were not finished. On February 8, 1967, the Experience was back at Olympic Studios with Eddie Kramer and George Chkiantz, trying to fatten a song Chandler thought was great but still choked in the original guitar sound, with the bass and drums sitting too dark. More lead and backing vocals went on. Noel doubled the bass to give the bottom some muscle. That is the record you are hearing: a slowed Memphis soul stomp, the kind of beat John Robertson later compared to Wilson Pickett, dressed up in feedback and finger vibrato. The intro is a volume swell. Hendrix holds a bent note, rolls the guitar’s volume knob up until the amp starts to sing back at him, and slides into that F-sharp minor seventh riff, seasoning it with the sharp-ninth chord guitar players still call the Hendrix chord. The American single climbed to number 67 on the Billboard Hot 100. The album went to number five over here and number two in Britain. When the Experience made their United States debut at the Monterey International Pop Festival on June 18, 1967, “Foxey Lady” was in the set, teeth, fire, and all.

Who the lady was depends on who you ask, and the stories do not line up clean. Kathy Etchingham, who met Hendrix at the Scotch of St James, has often been guessed at, and she has said she was not the subject. A stronger claim belongs to Lithofayne “Faye” Pridgon, who knew him in Harlem when he was still spelling it Jimmy. She told The Guardian she met him in 1963 hanging around the stage door of the Apollo, trying to get near Sam Cooke, and that she had already clocked him a year earlier. She liked skinny, raw-boned guys, called him a sweetheart, and said he was almost like her baby. The jealousy in the lyric, that “you’ve got to be all mine” line, tracks with how she remembered him. Other write-ups have pointed at Heather Taylor, the London scene face who later married Roger Daltrey of The Who. Hendrix never settled it in an interview the way a reporter would have liked. The song keeps its own counsel, which is probably why it still feels personal every time the riff starts.

None of that fire arrives out of nowhere. James Marshall Hendrix was born Johnny Allen Hendrix on November 27, 1942, at King County Hospital in Seattle, and his father, Al, renamed him after he got home from the service. The official biography on the family site tells the broom story plain. Al would come home and find broom straws around the foot of the bed, because the kid had been sitting there strumming the broom like a guitar. Al handed him a one-string ukulele, then, in the summer of 1958, a five-dollar secondhand acoustic. Jimmy joined the Velvetones, stayed about three months, and the next summer got his first electric, a Supro Ozark, and went out with the Rocking Kings. He listened to B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Buddy Holly, and Robert Johnson, and he taught himself because he could not read a chart.

In 1961 he enlisted in the Army, earned the Screaming Eagles patch with the paratroopers at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and started the King Casuals with bassist Billy Cox. A jump injury got him discharged. Under the name Jimmy James he worked the chitlin circuit and the session grind with Ike and Tina Turner, Sam Cooke, the Isley Brothers, and Little Richard, learning how a show band locks a groove and how a front man holds a room. By the end of 1965 he was in Greenwich Village leading Jimmy James and the Blue Flames at the Cafe Wha?. Linda Keith, then tied up with the Stones scene, dragged Animals bassist Chas Chandler down to hear him in July 1966. Chandler had already sworn he would cut Tim Rose’s “Hey Joe” with somebody once he got back to England. Hendrix opened with that very song, then tore into “Like a Rolling Stone” with a conviction Chandler said Bob Dylan himself had not quite put across. That was the set that convinced Chandler the career lived in the space between those two tunes.

Hendrix flew to London in September 1966 with a guitar, a small bag, pink hair curlers, and a jar of face cream, half convinced a British socket might not even run his amp. Chandler and Michael Jeffery took the management. Noel Redding, a guitarist who was broke and willing, got handed a bass. Mitch Mitchell won the drum chair on a coin flip. Chandler named the trio The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Rehearsals started almost immediately, “Hey Joe” came first, and “Foxey Lady” was one of the early album cuts, the sound of a Seattle kid who had swept floors with a broom-guitar finally plugging four Marshalls into a London room and telling the engineer where to put the microphone.

The family still runs the story from Experience Hendrix. The official home is jimihendrix.com, where the session notes on Are You Experienced and “Foxey Lady” live alongside the biography. The official Facebook page is Jimi Hendrix on Facebook, the official Instagram is @jimihendrix, and the official X account is @JimiHendrix. Fans still gather in the public jimi hendrix Fan Club group. Spin it again, Zoo Freaks. That feedback does not fade. It just waits for the next needle drop.