“Americans shocked me”: The best blues singer Mick Jagger wanted everyone to know
Nothing that Mick Jagger ever did with The Rolling Stones would have happened if not for the blues.
His entire friendship with Keith Richards happened when both of them connected over their love of their favourite artists, and when The Stones first got together, they were happy to keep playing their idols’ material before they were convinced to start fleshing their tunes out into something different. But when Jagger made his first trek to America, he was dumbfounded that these artists weren’t considered the biggest musicians in the world.
But the blues had never been widely accepted in America as much as it did in the London underground at the time. Most people were more interested in listening to whatever sophisticated pop music was out at the time, and when they did have time for the blues, it was normally packaged a different way, whether that was through country music or the early rock and rollers stealing their chord progressions.
Blues has always been a universal language to a certain degree, but Jagger felt that you needed to go to the source of all of those classic artists. You could hear the raw pain in the songs that Buddy Guy played, and when you go back to the days of Robert Johnson, no one else was wearing their heart on their sleeve quite like he did when talking about his deals with the devil.
If you were going by raw performance ability, though, no one seemed to have the same control over the audience that Muddy Waters did. He didn’t have to sing all the notes correctly or have the most pop-friendly voice to move people, and when he talked about having his mojo working, Jagger knew that he wanted to get anywhere close to what he was doing. Which is why it was strange coming over and seeing no one shouting his praises as much.
Make no mistake, Muddy Waters was still playing during that time, but Jagger was shocked to see him playing the same kinds of clubs that they were when they first came over. He assumed that he would have been one of the champions of great American music, and if no one else was going to shout his praises, Jagger was going to be the only person who could help bring his music above ground.
The rest of the pop sphere was still immersed in bands like The Beach Boys, but Jagger felt that America critically misunderstood what they had on their hands with Waters, saying, “Americans shocked me by their behaviour and their narrow-mindedness. They’ve got the greatest blues singer living among them, and they don’t even know.” But the whole point of blues was about passing it along to the next generation, and that’s what Jagger knew, that’s what he needed to do.
The Stones were still going to be a rock and roll band from the core, but listening to the way that they played a lot of their songs, they were still willing to do whatever they could to prop up the blues. Besides them cutting their teeth on this music, this was what raised them and gave them a reason to make music, so the least that they could do was pay it forward and remind everyone about what this music meant to them.
Muddy Waters had to spend a lot of his life being on the fringes of rock and roll, just like the rest of the blues heavyweights, but Jagger knew that he wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if he knew that people like him were forgotten. He was one of the people who helped come up with the genesis of rock and roll, and that’s a debt that no amount of lip service would ever come close to repaying.
