“You Gotta Move”: The Country Blues Roots of the Rolling Stones

A Celebration of Black Artists Who Inspired Keith and Mick

Muddy Waters holding one of his Library of Congress 78s, early 1940s.

Through their cover songs, the Rolling Stones have exposed generations of listeners to the music of Black American blues and gospel artists. This phenomenon began in the U.K., and by the mid-1960s had crossed over to America.

“When we started the Rolling Stones, we were just little kids, right?” Keith Richards explained in our 1992 interview. “We felt we had some of the licks down, but our aim was to turn other people on to Muddy Waters. I mean, we were carrying flags, idealistic teenage sort of shit. There was no way we thought anybody was really going to seriously listen to us, but we wanted to get a few people interested in listening to the music we thought they ought to listen to—which is very elitist and arrogant, to think you can tell other people what to listen to. But that was our aim, to turn people on to the blues. If we could turn them on to Muddy and Jimmy Reed and Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker, then our job was done.”

By the time Mick Jagger and Keith Richards became primary school friends in 1950, Richards was already passionate about Black American music. As he recalled in his autobiography Life, “At three or four or five years old, at the end of the war, I was listening to Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Big Bill Broonzy, Louis Armstrong. It just spoke to me. It was what I listened to every day because my mum played it. My ears would have gone there anyway, but my mum trained them to go to the Black part of town without her even knowing it.” Jagger was exposed to Black music as well, hearing records by country blues artists such as Leadbelly and Big Bill Broonzy, who toured England during the 1950s.

In 1954 the Jaggers moved to Wilmington, Kent, and the boyhood friends lost track of each other. As the decade progressed, Keith and Mick independently discovered the music of Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed, and other artists. Then, on October 17, 1961—one of the most fortuitous days in rock history—they bumped into each other while waiting for a train in the Dartford station.