The artist Keith Richards called the foundation of his playing: “What I was chasing as a young man”

Posted On February 21, 2025February 21, 2025

Every single rockstar has had those moments where all they have is a guitar and an amplifier when putting their first riffs together. There might be a long journey ahead of them becoming one of the biggest names in music, but everything starts in that bedroom when they start falling in love with music for the first time. And while Keith Richards was always indebted to the rock and roll that came before him, he knew that his love of the guitar went far deeper than the simple Chuck Berry licks.

Every classic Stones record dates back to the glory days of rock and roll. The band may have had the odd pop song in their arsenal like their Buddy Holly covers, but most of their material featured them performing more lively versions of blues songs that they heard as kids.

It’s not like blues isn’t a good place to start for a beginner guitarist. Even if the genre doesn’t rely on technique most of the time, the cornerstone of all good blues music comes from someone having a song in their heart and letting it out in whatever way they know how, whether that’s working on a simple 12-bar progression or taking it into new territory when breaking out the acoustic as Eric Clapton had done.

But while Richards had his love of Chuck Berry, he knew that a lot was waiting for him on the other side of rock and roll. There were a lot of blues musicians who managed to inhabit every piece of their inner pain and let it out through music, but the minute that he laid eyes on someone like Muddy Waters, Richards knew he was listening to a man who never minced his words for a second.

Outside of being the musician behind classics like ‘I Got My Mojo Workin’, Waters was a far more versatile guitarist than his contemporaries. BB King had a very conversational quality to his playing, and Robert Johnson made the guitar weep like no one had ever heard before Waters even came on the scene, but his innate sense of rhythm was the reason why so many of his tunes worked so well.

And for someone who prioritised rhythm over everything else, Richards knew that he could build himself up based on what Waters played, saying, “It’s the foundation. The blues was what I was chasing as a young man, and at one point I was going to stay there, and it was only rock and roll that got me out. [laughs] But to me, if you’re a rock musician, it’s essential to have a grounding in the blues, and it doesn’t get much better than Muddy Waters.”

Even though most people associate Waters with the lowdown and dirty blues that came out of Chicago back in the day, his off-kilter moments were also innovative for the time. Richards was equally interested in genres like country music, but he probably wasn’t going to get the same kind of bluesy tones out of an acoustic guitar until he heard Waters make records like Folk Singer, where he disassembled his group and made a pure, unplugged record.

However, the most important thing to take from Richards’s sound is that it doesn’t matter how many notes someone plays on every solo. It’s about how they speak through their instrument whenever they play, and listening back to Waters’s early recordings, he was a fountain of knowledge whenever someone gave him a guitar.

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