‘Confessin’ the Blues’: The BB King song Keith Richards loved the most
Any great song that Keith Richards has ever heard usually comes back to the blues. Although he has had many different faces when working with The Rolling Stones, Keef has been the true blues aficionado of the group ever since he stumbled across Mick Jagger carrying a few record sleeves of blues artists in his hand. Richards may have picked up on the blues from early rock and rollers, but he knew that this BB King song had everything that anyone was looking for in the genre.
Because out of every genre that the band played, none of them were meant to be the best players in the world. Charlie Watts may have certainly appreciated the proficiency that came with jazz, but in terms of listening to genres like country, jazz, or even the early days of rock and roll, it was about sparking a certain feeling in the listener rather than worrying about whether everyone played everything right on the money.
But for all that the blues gave to Richards, he was a rock and roller at heart. He may have gone on and on about the Gospel according to Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, but if they were his guitar prophets, then Chuck Berry was a living saint in his eyes, taking the core of the blues and bringing in that signature speed and fury that helped give birth to rock and roll.
So, to get to the blues, Richards had to do his homework on what Berry was listening to, saying, “I listened to every lick he played and picked it up. Chuck got it from T-Bone Walker, and I got it from Chuck, Muddy Waters, Elmore James and BB King. We’re all part of this family that goes back thousands of years.”
Out of all the biggest names in blues, though, BB King was always the master of emotion over technical proficiency. Throughout his time on this Earth, there was never a single note that he played that didn’t feel like it was being extracted from his soul, even if it meant him playing at the slowest tempo imaginable and letting the audience sit patiently awaiting what he was going to do next.
And in ‘Confessin’ The Blues’, King delivers a clinic on how to make a song jump. Whereas most artists would take this version of a blues shuffle and play patented Stevie Ray Vaughan licks over it today, the beauty of it is how much King is laying back into the groove, usually playing off the drummer and delivering the kind of licks that most people would be playing on their first day of learning the pentatonic scale.
It may not look like much, but in terms of raw emotion, no one was ever going to play the guitar like King did. Even when The Stones did their own take on the tune, there’s a certain amount of soul that gets lost when listening to them as kids trying to figure out what King was doing without thinking.
There may have been more seasoned blues aficionados to emerge from the 1960s blues scene, like Eric Clapton, but King let everyone know that it wasn’t all about speed. It was about using the instrument as an emotional translator, and given the recordings he made, King showed Richards how big his heart was.
