Keith Richards’ favourite Bob Dylan song: “All the elements of beautiful folk”
You might think that the likes of Keith Richards and The Rolling Stones would be free from influence or making an idol of others, but no. It seems that Bob Dylan’s impact has limitless reach, even touching the creative lives of his peers and the leaders of the music world.
Martha Wainwright once said that as a songwriter, “All roads led to Bob Dylan”. That seems to prove true. It’s not hard to find glowing comments about the folk legend, passed on by seemingly every big musical name going. Across all genres and all generations, Dylan’s influence remains strong, even amongst the crowd that sits right at the top.
Richards and Mick Jagger weren’t immune to the power of Dylan. By the time the Stones were just getting underway, the folk star had already climbed his way to the top of the music world. From being a folk unknown, brought out on stage to a duet with Joan Baez, the musician was quickly worshipped as the new mouthpiece of a generation or political writer who would save his nation.
In his early days, as he turned his pen to the state and various injustices of America, Dylan seemed to be the next great American poet. But as he went on and his instrumentation weaved between rock, pure country and a folk twang, he gathered flavours from further afield to make something unique.
It’s this melting pot of sound that undoubtedly inspired Richards. While the Stones were born and bred in England, their music felt American-made as they looked far beyond their own local scene to take influence from elsewhere. In the end, both Dylan and the Stones ended up landing on recipes that were a mix of old and new, American and English.
“While the British Invasion was going on, Bob Dylan was the man who really pulled the American point of view back into focus,” Richards said of the star, but added, “At the same time, he had been drawing on Anglo-Celtic folk songs, and that’s certainly true of ‘Girl From the North Country.’”
For Richards, it’s that mix of the two main camps of the folk world that makes ‘Girl From the North Country’ his top Dylan track. “It’s got all the elements of beautiful folk writing without being pretentious,” he said.
These early Dylan tracks proved inspiring to the Stones as a reminder that sometimes simple is best. “Before he went electric and submitted himself to that relentless discipline of a rhythm section, there was a beautiful flow in Bob’s songs that you can only get with just a voice and a guitar,” Richards explained. “He can float across the bar here and there. He’s not restricted by anything; it’s a beautiful form of expression. You let certain notes hang longer, and it doesn’t matter because it all goes with the song.”
That air of letting the song lead and the rest follow can definitely be felt on Richards’ own softer tracks like ‘Angie’ or ‘Wild Horses’. When the band stripped back their rock and roll to something gentler, Dylan’s impact was there.
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