Don's Home Arts Music Interpretations National Anthem - Jimi Hendrix - Woodstock 1969

In 2017 after football quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, knelt during the National Anthem in protest of police brutality and racism against African-Americans in the United States, there were serveral articles looking back at Hendrix rendition of the national anthem almost 50 years earlier as the closing act at
Woodstock, "an Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music" in 1969, where he was a headliner along with Joan Baez, Santana, the Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin, Arlo Guthrie, Jefferson Airplane, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and more. More than 400,000 people attended the concert in an open field on a dairy farm in Bethel, New York.

Was Hendrix performance of the National Anthem an act of protest similar to Kaepernick's?

  Rain delays pushed Hendrix program into Monday, and a lot of people had left.
After a two hour set he played his regular concert-closer, "Voodoo Child (Slight Return). He then made a rare decision to perform an encore, and a mid-set medley that featured this solo rip at "The Star-Spangled Banner" on his Fender Stratocaster.
In his memoir, Hendrix's drummer, Mitch Mitchell, admitted that the band "hadn't rehearsed ... or planned to do 'The Star-Spangled Banner' at Woodstock."

• One music critic called it the best popular music performance of all time; One of the most iconic moments in music culture.
• Some said it was a protest of the Vietnam War.
• Some said it represented the bombs bursting in air when the national anthem lyricist, Francis Scott Key, observed the flag still standing after British bombardment of Fort McHenry, which guarded Baltimore Harbor in 1814 during the War of 1812 and wrote the National Anthem.
    The squeals of amplifier feedback and dive-bombing on his electric guitar's vibrato bar have been said to evoke combat, fighter jets, artillery, ambulance sirens and, perhaps, riots in the streets. It also included a segue into taps, the traditional bugle call played at military funerals.
• Hendrix said "We're all Americans... It was like 'Go America!'... We play it the way the air is in America today."

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame describes him as "the greatest instrumentalist in the history of rock music".