At the Cowboy Carter Tour, Beyoncé sings the Star Spangled Banner over Jimi Hendrix’s iconic guitar version of the national anthem from Woodstock. Hendrix’s version came a year after the assassination of MLK & during the American protests surrounding the Vietnam War. The New Yorker wrote about Hendrix’s rendition a few years back: “All the exalted ideals of the American experiment, and the bitterness of its contradictions and hypocrisies, are placed in volatile admixture through an utterly American contraption, a device you might say is the result of a collaboration between Benjamin Franklin, Leo Fender , and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the mongrel machine that Hendrix made into a medium for a new kind of virtuosity. In the Woodstock performance of the national anthem, we find that an electric guitar can be made to convey the feeling that the country’s history could be melted down, remolded, and given a new shape.” #CowboyCarterTour
