(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Everything that Keith Richards ever played was indebted to the music he heard out of America.
The British invasion may have given a spotlight to what the UK had to offer the US at the time, a lot of the artists in Richards’s record collection had a lot more to do with the blues artists coming out of the Deep South than anything to do with the crooners of yesteryear. He had a healthy respect for any rootsy rock and roll he could get his hands on, but outside of the blues, he had one foot in the country music world as well.
The Stones couldn’t stay a blues-rock act forever, and when they started embracing the country textures on a few of their tunes, they ended up having a lot more emotional power than they would have ever thought. It may have taken the help of people like Gram Parsons for them to understand what they could do, but no one else could have matched what they ended up doing on tunes like ‘Wild Horses’.
And for as much as people have a strong reaction when a band shifts genres around, the sound of acoustic ditties and a little bit of twang worked shockingly well on the band. Keef’s voice lent itself well to those down-and-out songs since he had a far rougher voice, but it’s not like Mick Jagger couldn’t add his fair share of backing vocals to tunes like ‘Happy’ or even try on a hick accent when singing tunes like ‘Far Away Eyes’.
It’s not like there was any precedent for artists to embrace country music, either. The Beatles had done it a few times in the early phase of Beatlemania, and the Eagles made a whole career out of combining both genres under one roof, but Richards wasn’t only looking to emulate his friends. Because if he knew one thing from the blues, it was about going back to the prime source in any genre.
There were already great country singers who got most rockers’ seal of approval, like Johnny Cash, but there was a certain power George Jones had that resonated a lot better with the general public. For all the darkness that ‘The Man in Black’ had in his voice, Jones seemed like the pure-hearted country artist that anyone could fall in love with, even when he was singing tunes that could rip your heart out.
And when he passed away, Richards knew that the world had lost a musical legend, saying, “George was as country as it can get, but he was beyond any bag you want to put him in. He was pure American music without ever waving a flag. He possessed the most touching voice, the most expressive ways of projecting that beautiful instrument of anyone I can call to mind. You heard his heart in every note he sang. Sinatra called him the second best singer ever. I would contest that.”
Judging by the kind of emotion he put into his hits, though, it’s hard to argue with Richards’s claim. While there have been decades of separation between his music and what’s out today, you could play ‘He Stopped Lovin’ Her Today’ to the elderly grandmothers of the world or a teenager and they would both have a good chance of having tears streaming down their face by the end of the tune.
Because if there was one thing that Jones mastered better than anyone else, it was the power of empathy. Not everyone had to necessarily go through the exact problem that he was singing about, but it’s hard not to feel every single moment that he’s going through on any number of his classic tunes.
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