“It’s that style”: The artist Keith Richards called the king of soul guitar
No rock and roll band is going to get anywhere without having some conviction behind them. It’s easy to try to fake it until you make it, but there’s a certain spark that people who genuinely believe in what they’re singing rather than those who want to make a quick buck off their fans. While Keith Richards has been in there for the long haul, he knew that some of the most genuine music in the world went far beyond the blues.
Then again, it’s not like Richards needed much outside of the three chords that he built his career on. The Stones have had many different incarnations where they’ve tried their hand at everything from country to disco to even stabs at punk, but sitting down with an old blues cover of a Muddy Waters tune was usually more than enough for them to get the ball rolling, especially when Richards threw in those signature Chuck Berry licks.
But when the band started, rock and roll was only one facet of what the charts were all about. If anyone had any hope of breaking into the Top 20, they would be up against everything from show tunes to straightforward pop to some of the best country songs of the era. Out of every genre, though, there was nothing that would hold a candle to the early soul music coming out of America.
Granted, the biggest names of soul may have learned their lessons from blues, but they were able to take everything much further. It’s easy to call someone like Ray Charles bluesy if you wanted to, but listening to tracks like ‘What’d I Say’ and ‘Let The Good Times Roll’, he was far more interested in getting that signature groove behind his music and that extra gravel in his voice. But if Curtis Mayfield didn’t have the gravel in his voice, he certainly had the swagger in his guitar playing.
While his stint with the Impressions gave him some of his earliest hits, Springfield will forever be known for what he was doing for the soulful side of the guitar. Anyone starting out in rock and roll had to be on another level for Jimi Hendrix to call them an inspiration, and listening to some of his licks do seem to predict where Hendrix got the idea for ‘The Wind Cries Mary’.
Even when working on their own soul music on tunes like ‘Almost Hear You Sigh’, Richards felt that Mayfield was the ruler of every soul lick ever produced, saying, “When you’re playing something like that, the obvious thing you start hitting is the soul licks. As we started to add the bridge part and it started to open up for me, then I thought to myself exactly what you said – Curtis Mayfield. It’s that style. Curtis is the king of that.”
And it’s not like Richards didn’t share Mayfield’s love for strange tunings. Since Richards had become for the open-G tuning, the ‘black key’ tuning that his soulful counterpart had on his guitar made everything groove in a certain way, especially when playing the handful of stabs and the scratchy rhythms on the Superfly soundtrack.
While Mayfield already has his face etched in the book of music history, the fact that Richards idolised his playing is a better indicator of what The Stones were all about. They had blues as their foundation, but they knew that they were better off spending their lives trying out any kind of music that turned them on.
