The 1970s singer Keith Richards loved singing with most: “Spend days at the piano”
Keith Richards wasn’t the kind of person cut out to be the lead singer of any of his projects.
Even though The Rolling Stones always worked best as a whole, Richards’s secondary role was being the partner in crime Mick Jagger could fall back on in case he started making too big an ass out of himself every single time he got up onstage. And even if Richards did have a few songs to highlight his singing, he knew that his voice wasn’t always cut out for singing with his mates all the time.
Then again, it’s not like Richards’s solo career was ever meant to set the world on fire by any stretch. He always liked the idea of playing music with his friends whenever he had the chance, and even if his takes on old bluesy tunes didn’t reach the market the same way that his rock songs did, he wasn’t really losing sleep when he had people like Steve Jordan alongside him to make the best tunes that he could.
But there was always a different side to Richards every time he picked up an acoustic guitar. There were plenty of Robert Johnson classics that were born out of the blues pioneer sitting in a chair with an acoustic in his hands, but when you look at Richards’s upbringing, he was just as interested in what the biggest names in country music were doing as he was with Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters.
Because when you think about it, country music has never been that far away from blues when you think about it. There are still some great tunes that have come from the Mississippi Delta that sound like blues tunes, but themes about getting your heart broken and having to pick up the pieces of a failed relationship in every Nashville tune are just the blues if they learned a few more chords and got some twang in it.
And no one seemed to know the genre better than Gram Parsons when Richards started hanging out with him. Compared to everyone else trying to make rootsy music in California, Parsons was one of the first people who actually seemed to walk the walk whenever he made a record, and he was practically the countrified sage of music for Richards when he started pulling out older country tunes that everyone else would have needed to do some serious digging to find.
Richards was smitten with this kind of music, and compared to singing background on a handful of Stones songs, he felt that Parsons was the perfect singing partner for him, saying, “I used to spend days at the piano with Gram, you know, just singing. I did more singing with Gram than I’ve done with the Stones. He taught me all the Everly Brothers stuff and the cross harmonies and shit like that. He was living with us then for 2 or 3 months. He wrote SONGS, man! He kept going; he would go all day without ever repeating himself.”
It took a while for those kinds of songs to turn up on any Stones records, but you can definitely feel the spirit of Parsons in every single country tune that Richards pulled out. ‘Happy’ and ‘Far Away Eyes’ are perfect examples of him trying to make the same kind of music that he heard when he jammed with Parsons, but ‘Sweet Virginia’ is the only time when he seemed to internalise every single lesson that his friend had to offer and applied it.
Parsons’s death in the 1970s is still one of the greatest tragedies in country rock history, but the lessons that he taught Richards have left their mark on the world of music forever. He didn’t necessarily need to have some of the greatest tunes in his arsenal all the time, but his wisdom and background in country music are the reasons why everyone from The Stones to Eagles weren’t afraid to tackle country tunes.
