The first time Keith Richards heard the blues: “I had a natural affinity for it”
Behind many of history’s greatest rock legends lies a deep-rooted adoration for the blues. This influence weaves through rock ‘n’ roll like an unbroken thread, serving as a structural backbone and an emotional core—fueling limitless exploration and unwavering originality. Keith Richards has often spoken about his love for the genre and how it ultimately changed his worldview.
Like many fixations, pinpointing the moment Richards discovered and fell in love with the blues is difficult. However, this vague starting point means it always felt natural, listening to the many jazz records his mother would play and how, one day, all he could hear was the blues. Although he didn’t consciously experience any real epiphany, it felt normal, like it matched something already inside him, waiting to be awakened.
“I realised that I was brought up on a broad basis of blues music without even knowing it, so, in a way, I’m a result of what my mum played,” he explained to the Guardian in 2009. “I had a natural affinity for it, I think, so it wasn’t like a conscious thing or anything like that.” Listening to the music and going on feeling alone, Richards realised it didn’t matter who a musician was or what they looked like; if the music went bone-deep, that’s all that counted. “It was just what came in the ears and, my, what it did to you,” he said.
This centralising of feeling and experience ultimately introduced him to the power of music at its most basic. To him, blues wasn’t just another musical genre; it was a conduit to another viscera, one centred on placing the listener at its crux, enabling them to embody the spirit of its energy, even if they didn’t understand why or how. When he listened to Chuck Berry for the first time, he could detect the blues influence, knowing already that it formed the basis of another impending rock explosion.
Connecting the dots with Berry led him to Muddy Waters, which also set him on a path of venturing back even further, or deeper, borrowing sounds from others’ record collections to complete his portrait of blues history and influence. Building out his own artistic vision started by unravelling the secrets of the past, which is where The Rolling Stones ultimately “distilled this stuff and listened and tried to figure out what we’ve been missing out on.”
Beneath the surface, however, Richards realised one glaring issue in his master plan: these blues legends had already lived a thousand lives, and here he was, cooped up studying them without much experience elsewhere. As he put it: “I loved rock’n’roll but there’s got to be something behind the rock’n’roll. There had to be. We found, of course, that it was the blues. And, therefore, if you really want to learn the basics, then you’ve got to do some homework.”
The moment the Stones took off, Richards knew how to be an all-rounder, armed with extensive knowledge of all things blues and how it formulated the basics of modern rock ‘n’ roll. On top of that, however, he knew how to let his experiences translate into charisma, making the Stones’ take on blues-inspired rock feel—and sound—as electrifying as initially intended. “To me, that was the whole point – you’d died and gone to heaven.”
