191. Song No. 2,879: “Earth Blues,” Jimi Hendrix
People, Hell and Angels, 2013 (orig. recorded 1969)

Right out of the gate, within 20 minutes of starting the E’s, this song fucking came out ready to demand the audience it knows it deserves. Even my newfound and shamelessly rabid infatuation with “Earthquakes and Sharks” didn’t come on as hard, fast and early as this gobsmackingly good bit of posthumous Hendrix did.

Loving Hendrix’s stuff always seemed to be more the domain of actual musicians than music fans, so I never developed an early and avid appreciation for him like I did for so many of his contemporaries (the classic rock I was raised on was also very, very white, so). By the time this collection of previously unreleased recordings emerged, though, a lot of enthusiastic aficionados had helped rectify a lot of the glaring gaps in my music taste, and I was ready to dig into a whole bunch of never-before-heard songs and appreciate the bounty we were about to receive.

And obviously it was great and merited a few spins but other music was too tempting to ignore and I completely forgot about this album for years until “Earth Blues” rocked my face off as I went about daily tasks and got sucked into it more and more with every absolutely rapt repeat. Because this song is groovy and catchy and funky as hell but deals one mighty lyrical, spiritual and beleaguered-by-earthly-woes wallop once you stop paying attention to the music at the exclusion of the story it’s trying to tell.

I mean, obviously, we all know that Hendrix was an absolute force of nature but coming face-to-face with it via a lesser-known song that comes screaming out of nowhere is a treat amplified by its unexpected appearance. There is no magic like listening to a song from years before you were born that just pulls the “I didn’t even know music could do that!” right out of you.