“You Gotta Move”: The Country Blues Roots of the Rolling Stones
A Celebration of Black Artists Who Inspired Keith and Mick
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.
The way Keith tells it, at that moment he was as interested in what Mick was holding as he was in the man himself: “Mick had The Best of Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry Is on Top under his arm, which were very hard to get in England. I said, ‘Hey, man, nice to see you, but where’d you get the records?!’” By then, Mick had already collected a few blues and R&B albums. “The first Muddy Waters album that was really popular was Muddy Waters at Newport,” he recalled, “which was the first album I ever bought.”
By then the “blues boom” was underway in London, and Jagger and Richards began meeting at small venues. One night in 1962, they witnessed a performance by a diminutive blonde-haired guitarist who stunned them with his playing. “We first met Brian Jones at the Ealing Jazz Club,” Keith detailed in his book. “He was calling himself Elmo Lewis. He wanted to be Elmore James at the time. Slide guitar was a real novelty in England, and Brian played it that night. He played ‘Dust My Broom,’ and it was electrifying. He played it beautifully. We were very impressed with Brian. I think Mick was the first one to go up and talk to him, and discovered he had his own band, most of whom deserted him in the next few weeks.”
Jones, already adept on a variety of instruments, introduced Richards to the music of one of the most skilled artists of prewar country blues, Robert Johnson. At the time, Keith wrote, Brian was “living in this damp basement in Powis Square with fungus growing up the wall. And that’s where I first heard Robert Johnson and came under Brian’s tutorship and delved into the blues with him. I was astounded at what I heard. It took guitar playing, songwriting, delivery, to a totally different height. At the same time, it confused us, because it wasn’t band music, it was one guy. So how can we do this? And we realized the guys we were playing, like Muddy Waters, had also grown up with Robert Johnson and had translated it into a band format. In other words, it was just a progression.
“What I found out about the blues and music, tracing things back, was that nothing came from itself. As great as it is, this is not one stroke of genius. This cat was listening to somebody and it’s his variation on a theme. And so you suddenly realize that everybody’s connected here. This is not just that he’s fantastic and the rest are crap; they’re all interconnected. And the further you went back into music and time, and with the blues you go back to the ’20s, because you’re basically going through recorded music, you think ‘Thank God for recording.’ It’s the best thing that’s happened to us since writing.”
Jagger, Richards, and Jones were soon sharing a flat and jamming to blues records. They began playing with bassist Bill Wyman and drummer Charlie Watts, who was already successful. Brian named their band after a song on The Best of Muddy Waters. “Muddy was my man,” Keith insists. “He’s the guy I listened to. I felt an immediate affinity when I heard Muddy play the opening lick from ‘Rollin’ Stone.’ You can’t be harder than that, man. He said it all right there.”
For their debut album, 1964’s The Rolling Stones, the band focused on covering contemporary singles by Black American artists. Among its twelve cuts were nine songs that had recently been released by Marvin Gaye, Chuck Berry, Jimmy Reed, Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, Slim Harpo, Rufus Thomas, and Gene Allison. The Stones’ homage to soulful Black American singers and songwriters continued on their second studio LP, 1965’s The Rolling Stones No. 2, with covers of singles by Alvin Robinson, Chuck Berry, Solomon Burke, Otis Redding, and Muddy Waters. Driven by Brian Jones’s slide guitar, their respectful recasting of Muddy’s “I Can’t Be Satisfied” was the LP’s bluesiest track:
This song had its roots in the prewar county blues of the Deep South. Waters had composed it while he was a young field hand in northwest Mississippi. Performing in his shack on Stovall’s plantation, he recorded his first version in 1941 for the Library of Congress. At that time he called it “I Be’s Troubled” and told the session’s supervisor, Alan Lomax, that it was an original tune he’d made up while walking down the road after hearing a church song. Using a bottleneck for slide, he played it in the open-G tuning Son House had taught him:
Seven years later, Morganfield, now living in Chicago, recut the tune for the fledgling Chess Records label. It’s flip side, “I Feel Like Going Home,” was likewise a recasting of one of his Library of Congress sides. Big Crawford played bass on both tracks, and Waters used an acoustic guitar outfitted with a soundhole pickup. Amplification added sustain to his searing, whining slide:
This record jumpstarted Muddy’s career. Vastly different from the sax jumps and smoky ballads dominating the R&B charts, Muddy’s surging Delta rhythms signaled the beginning of the greatest creative era of Chicago blues. “I Can’t Be Satisfied” was released on a Friday afternoon in April 1948. Distributed from car trunks to record stores, beauty salons, barber shops, and train porters, the initial pressing of 3,000 sold out by Saturday evening. Muddy enjoyed recounting how he went to the Maxwell Radio Record Company to buy a couple of copies and found they were charging $1.10 for the 79¢ record and limiting sales to one per customer. Even after exclaiming “But I’m the man who made it,” he left clutching only a single copy. “All of a sudden,” he recalled, “I became Muddy Waters, you know? People started to speakin’ to me, hollerin’ across streets at me.”
By 1965, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had begun composing original songs. The first hit single to bear the Jagger/Richards songwriting credit, “The Last Time,” came out on Out of Our Heads and entered the U.K. charts at #5:
While the Stones deserve credit for the song’s exhilarating guitar hook, the lyrics and melody were partly derived from the Staple Singers’ 1955 recording of an old Black spiritual, “This May Be the Last Time.”
In the 2003 book According to the Rolling Stones, Richards wrote of their initial songwriting experience: “It seemed to us it took months and months and in the end, we came up with ‘The Last Time,’ which was basically re-adapting a traditional gospel song that had been sung by the Staple Singers, but luckily the song itself goes back into the mists of time. I think I was trying to learn it on the guitar just to get the chords, sitting there playing along with the record, no gigs, nothing else to do.
“At least we put our own stamp on it, as the Staple Singers had done, and as many other people have before and since. They’re still singing it in churches today. It gave us something to build on to create the first song that we felt we could decently present to the band to play… ‘The Last Time’ was kind of a bridge into thinking about writing for the Stones. It gave us a level of confidence, a pathway of how to do it.”
The Rolling Stones’ took one of their deepest dives into Black country blues on their landmark 1968 album Beggars Banquet. Among its ten tracks are nine Jagger/Richard originals and an unforgettable rendition of Rev. Robert Wilkins’s “Prodigal Son,” sung by Jagger and played by Richards on an open-tuned acoustic guitar:
Robert Wilkins’s first recording of this song dated back to September 1929, when he recorded it for Brunswick Records as “That’s No Way to Get Along.” His guitar tuned to an open-E chord, he framed his original lyrics with a catchy, easy-to-play metronomic arrangement punctuated with note-perfect string bends and distinctive half-step octave climbs. His lyrics portrayed a man telling his mother of his mistreatment by “low-down” women:
“Those cuts on Brunswick are incredible,” observes country blues guitar expert Stefan Grossman. “Robert Wilkins was great, and his arrangements are very unusual. ‘That’s No Way to Get Along’ was a common melody—Furry Lewis and a lot of other guys did it—except for the part where he brings up the IV chord by half-steps. Wilkins very cleverly put together his riffs and constructed an arrangement around them, the same way Eric Clapton does today.”
A family tradition holds that in 1942 Wilkins promised God that he’d give up playing the blues if his wife survived a life-threatening illness. With her recovery, Wilkins kept his promise and became a minister of the Church of God in Christ in 1950. The denomination’s encouragement of music enabled him to resume playing guitar. While he no longer performed blues, he reused some of his old arrangements and melodies for gospel tunes. “That’s No Way to Get Along” metamorphosed into “Prodigal Son,” an epic retelling of the parable in the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 15.
In 1964 blues researcher Dick Spottswood located Rev. Wilkins in Memphis, where he had a sideline preparing and selling herbal remedies. Spottswood arranged for Wilkins to come to Washington, D.C., to record his debut LP, Memphis Gospel Singer, for the Piedmont label. “Playing-wise, he hadn’t lost a thing,” Spottswood noted. “We made recordings in the living room, including that magnificent ‘Prodigal Son.’” This is the version that likely inspired Mick and Keith:
Even after the Rolling Stones covered his most famous song, Rev. Wilkins steadfastly refused to play the blues. “No, my conscience won’t let me do it,” he confided. “It’s something within. My children even, and all of my friends that know me, say: ‘It looks like you could just go and play the blues, make two or three records of the blues. If that was me,’ they say, ‘I wouldn’t miss the money.’ Well, it looks good, but then I have scripture say: ‘What does it profit a man to gain the world and lose his soul?’” Rev. Wilkins stayed true to his beliefs and lived into his nineties, passing away in 1987.
On 1969’s Let It Bleed, the Rolling Stones paid tribute to Robert Johnson with an innovative reading of “Love in Vain.” In 1937, the legendary bluesman had recorded the song at his final session. Johnson drew his melodic inspiration from earlier songs, notably Leroy Carr’s “When the Sun Goes Down”:
With Keith on acoustic and electric guitars and Ry Cooder on mandolin, the Stones version is significantly different from Johnson’s original—intentionally so. “‘Love in Vain’ was such a beautiful song,” Keith explained. “Mick and I both loved it, and at the time I was working and playing around with Gram Parsons. And I started searching around for a different way to present it, because if we were going to record it there was no point in trying to copy the Robert Johnson style. We took it a little bit more country, a little bit more formalized, and Mick felt comfortable with that.”
“We changed the arrangement quite a lot from Robert Johnson’s,” Jagger confirmed in a Rolling Stone interview. “We put in extra chords that aren’t there on the Robert Johnson version. Made it more country. And that’s another strange song, because it’s very poignant. Robert Johnson was a wonderful lyric writer, and his songs are quite often about love, but they’re desolate.”
While on tour in December 1969, the Rolling Stones once again paid homage to Black country blues. As Keith described in his autobiography, “Oiled up and running hot, in early December we ended up at Muscle Shoals Sound Studios in Sheffield, Alabama. There we cut ‘Wild Horses,’ ‘Brown Sugar,’ and ‘You Gotta Move.’ Three tracks in three days, in that perfect eight-track recording studio.” The first two songs became big hits. The third delivered a heartfelt rendering of a traditional gospel-blues.
“You’ve Got to Move,” a.k.a. “You Gotta Move,” was well-known among Black church-goers. In 1948 the Two Gospel Keys released a rousing guitar-and-tambourine version. During the ensuing fifteen years, Elder Charles D. Beck and congregation, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the Original Five Blind Boys of Alabama, the Hightower Brothers, and Rev. Gary Davis recorded it as well. In 1964, soul singer Sam Cooke did a secular version.
For inspiration for their version, the Rolling Stones turned to Mississippi Fred McDowell, who hailed from Como, Mississippi, and had recently released two mesmerizing versions. The first of these was a solo performance taped in Berkeley, California, in July 1965 by Chris Strachwitz of Arhoolie Records. His guitar tuned to an open-D chord, McDowell played his slide parts with a short bottleneck worn on his ring finger:
The following February, McDowell traveled to Chicago with his wife and other members of his congregation to record an LP of spiritual and gospel songs. Issued on the Testament Records LP The Hunter’s Chapel Singers, this transcendent take was titled “You’ve Got to Move”:
When recording “You Gotta Move” at Muscle Shoals, Keith Richards and Mick Taylor tuned their guitars a full step lower than McDowell, to open C (G, G, C, G, C, E). In our 1979 interview, Mick Taylor confirmed that he used a Fender Telecaster for the slide and overdubbed the 12-string acoustic, while Keith used a resophonic guitar. “He had two of them,” Mick recalled. “One of them was totally steel, and the other one was a really great, beautiful guitar that he got in Brazil. It was like a National guitar, but it was made of wood and metal. I’m not sure whether he used that one or the other one.”
After Sticky Fingers came out, the Rolling Stones organization saw to it that McDowell was paid royalties. In his liner notes for McDowell’s Mississippi Delta Blues CD anthology, Chris Strachwitz explained, “In the spring of 1972, when I visited Fred for what turned out to be the last time, I handed him a check from sales of that song. Fred had never seen that much money in his life and he was truly grateful for receiving his share. But I think he was actually more delighted knowing his music had made such an impact on a popular band who, in turn, saw to it that it was handed on to a huge audience, the size of which Fred could never have reached on his own. Bonnie Raitt also recorded several of Fred’s songs after his death, and so his music and songs will live on in the hearts of many who never knew him in person.”
After McDowell passed away in July 1972, this verse from “You Gotta Move” was inscribed on his headstone:
You may be high, you may be low
You may be rich, child, you may be poor
But when the Lord gets ready, you got to move
From the early 1970s on, the Rolling Stones have continued to pay homage to their Black country blues forebears, albeit less frequently than in the 1960s. Standouts examples include the live “Love in Vain” on Get Your Ya-Ya’s Out and Stripped, the slide-driven rendering of Robert Johnson’s “Stop Breaking Down” on Exile on Main Street, and the spirited “You Gotta Move” on Love You Live, to name but a few.
In addition to introducing countless listeners to Black American gospel, blues, and R&B artists, the Rolling Stones’ 1960s cover songs brought dramatic increases in the bookings and record sales of the artists they championed. Many of these artists expressed gratitude for the long-haired British musicians who helped bring their music center stage in the land of its creation. As Muddy Waters so aptly put it, “That’s a funny damn thing. Had to get somebody from out of another country to let my white kids over here know where we stand. They’re crying for bread and got it in their own backyard.”
###
For more coverage of pre-war blues, check out the Talking Guitar articles linked here: Blind Blake, Barbecue Bob, Lonnie Johnson, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Ma Rainey, Memphis Minnie, Mississippi John Hurt, Blind Willie Johnson, Papa Charlie Jackson, Johnny Shines, Rev. Robert Wilkins, Blind Willie McTell, Son House and Willie Brown, Blind Boy Fuller and Rev. Gary Davis, the Atlanta Blues, and the Origins of Spanish and Vestapol Tunings.
For more Rolling Stones:
Talking Blues With Keith Richards
Mick Taylor Interview: Inside the Rolling Stones
Charlie Watts: The Audio of Our 1994 Interview
Ronnie Wood on the Rolling Stones, Faces, and Slide Guitar (Audio)
.
To help me support my family and continue producing guitar-intensive articles and podcasts, please become a paid subscriber ($5 a month, $40 a year) or hit that donate button. Paid subscribers have complete access to all of the 150+ articles and podcasts posted in Talking Guitar. Thank you for your much-appreciated support!
©2024 Jas Obrecht. All right reserved.