It's extremely difficult to separate the facts of Hendrix's life from rumors and speculation. Everyone who knew him well, or claimed to know him well, has different versions of his state of mind in 1970. Critics have variously mused that he was going to go into jazz, that he was going to get deeper into the blues, that he was going to continue doing what he was doing, or that he was too confused to know what he was doing at all. The same confusion holds true for his death: contradictory versions of his final days have been given by his closest acquaintances of the time. He'd been working intermittently on a new album, tentatively titled First Ray of the New Rising Sun, when he died in London on September 18, 1970, from drug-related complications.

"Little Wing" was part of his second album "Axis: Bold as Love" (1967). This song was inspired by the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, a concert held during 3 days of the "Summer of Love" (1967) featuring The Who, The Byrds, Janis Joplin, and many others. Attended by about 200,000 music fans, it happened 2 years before Woodstock. Jimi wrote about the atmosphere at the festival as if it was a girl. He described the feeling as "Everybody really flying and in a nice mood." He named it "Little Wing" because he thought it could just fly away.

The guitar on the song is played in a very unique style. Jimi frets the roots of chords with his thumb, and then elaborates on them. It often involves shifts of quartile to tertian harmony and vice versa. In theory it is quite similar to the Jazz style of chord melody. The percussion instrument that sounds like a xylophone is a glockenspiel, an instrument popular in marching bands containing steel bars that are stuck with hammers to produce notes. Jimi ran his guitar through a Leslie speaker to create an unusual sound. The Leslie speaker was designed for organs and contains a rotating paddle that distorts the sound.

In 1963 Jimi recorded a song that may have been a precursor to this. The song "Fox," which was one of his first recordings was played with sax player Lonnie Youngblood and sounded very similar to this.

This is one of the songs that had to be remixed just before the album was released when one of the master tapes went missing. No one ever found out what happened to the original tape but its been speculated that Jimi either accidentally left the tape in a taxi or purposely disposed of the tape because he wasn't satisfied with its sound.

This song, along with "Spanish Castle Magic," are the only songs Hendrix ever performed in concert from his Axis: Bold as Love album. He played this live only 8 times.

Hendrix has described this as being one of the few he likes from this album. He said "Little Wing" is "like one of those beautiful girls that come around sometimes." Hendrix enjoyed writing slow songs because it was easier to put emotion into them.

The same day they recorded "Layla," Eric Clapton and Duane Allman recorded this as a tribute to Jimi, who was one of their guitar heroes. Hendrix died 9 days later. He never heard their version of his song, which was released in 1970 on the Derek and the Dominos album, Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs.

Jimi Hendrix died on 18 September 1970.