Keith Richards once crowned the greatest blues singer of all time: “You can’t be harder than that”
When it comes to the elements of music that Keith Richards likes the most, he has been upfront in saying that he has a real affinity for anything honest and true.
When something feels like it has occurred naturally, and a voice is unfiltered in how it sings, it seems to evoke something in The Rolling Stones guitarist that no other piece of music can. This is why his favourite genres of music are those that embody emotion more than others, which for him are reggae, rock ‘n’ roll and, of course, the blues.
“What I love about reggae is that it’s all so natural, there’s none of this forced stuff that I was getting tired of in rock music,” he said, “Rock ‘n’ roll I never get tired of, but ‘rock’ is a white man’s version, and they turn it into a march, that’s [the modern] version of rock […] I prefer the roll.”
With this mindset, it’s no surprise that he loves the blues as much as he does. It’s an incredibly emotive art form that comes from periods of hardship. These emotions carry beautifully in both vocals and instrumentation throughout the genre, which is why it has such a broad appeal to people.
When he was asked to list his favourite singers of all time, he leaned heavily into the emotive side of music. He had some soul singers high up, but the highest-ranked blues singer was Muddy Waters, someone who Richards referenced when initially discovering his love for the blues. “I got into Muddy Waters,” he said, “And then, before I knew it, that leads you immediately to Robert Johnson, and then you’re before the war, and you’re into this other stuff.”
While Waters may not have been the most technical singer of all time, he did carry a raspy style that was laced with emotion. As such, when you consider Richards’ comments about music being natural, it’s hardly a surprise he praises Waters so much.
Richards once said of the great man’s guitar work especially, “Muddy Waters is my man. He’s the guy I listened to. Maybe I just picked it up off of him. I recognised it. It was just the same as my drive. I felt an immediate affinity when I heard Muddy go [picks up guitar and plays the opening lick from ‘Rollin’ Stone’]. You can’t be harder than that, man. He said it all right there.”
It also shouldn’t come as a surprise to Rolling Stones fans that Richards holds Muddy Waters in such a high regard, given the band was formed following the members attending a Muddy Waters show when he came to the UK. All of the Rolling Stones were obsessed with both the blues and R&B, to the extent that they wanted to start their own band that would make such music. Before Richards and Mick Jagger were proficient songwriters, the band covered Muddy Waters as an homage to the artist who meant so much to them.
“Mick was as much of a maniac. Brian as well, an absolute maniac […] It was the sheer monotony, the sheer non-stop throttling hypnotism that got Charlie into the blues,” said Richards, “And these cats are great. After all, they were all jazz drummers in one form or another. The thing we didn’t realise then is that cats in the States didn’t put everybody in a bag. In England, you were put in a bag – he’s jazz, he’s this, he’s pop, he’s rock, da-da-da.”
That refusal to box music into neat categories became one of the defining features of The Rolling Stones themselves. Even when they evolved beyond straight blues covers and began writing their own material, the spirit of artists like Muddy Waters never disappeared from their sound. Richards still approached the guitar with the same loose, rolling feel that first captivated him when listening to Chicago blues records as a teenager.
It also explains why Richards has always been suspicious of overly polished music. The blues was never meant to sound perfect or pristine. Its power came from imperfections, from hearing someone strain their voice or drag a beat slightly behind the rhythm in a way that felt human. For Richards, Muddy Waters represented the purest version of that philosophy, proving that emotion and groove would always matter more than technical perfection.
