Keith Richards
Keith Richards (born 18 December 1943) is an English guitarist, singer, songwriter, best-selling memoirist, and founding member of the rock band The Rolling Stones. Rolling Stone Magazine credited Richards for “rock’s greatest single body of riffs” on guitar and ranked him 4th on its list of 100 best guitarists.
Fourteen songs that Richards wrote with the Rolling Stones’ lead vocalist Mick Jagger are listed among Rolling Stone magazine’s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time.”
The Stones are generally known for their guitar interplay of rhythm and lead (“weaving”) between Richards and Brian Jones, Mick Taylor and Ronnie Wood over the years.
In spite of this, Richards plays the only guitar tracks on some of their most famous songs including “Paint It Black”, “Ruby Tuesday”, “Sympathy for the Devil”, “Gimme Shelter””, and “Angie.”
Keith Richards: Early Years
Richards was born December 18, 1943 at Livingston Hospital, in Dartford, Kent, England. He is the only child of Doris M. L. (née Dupree) and Herbert W. Richards.
His father was a factory worker who was injured in World War II during the Normandy invasion. Richards’ paternal grandparents, Ernie and Eliza Richards, were socialists and civic leaders, who he credited as “more or less creat(ing) the Walthamstow Labour Party”,with Eliza also serving as mayor of the Municipal Borough of Walthamstow in London in 1941.
His maternal grandfather, Augustus Theodore “Gus” Dupree, toured Britain with a jazz big band Gus Dupree and his Boys, helped develop Richards’ interest in guitar. Richards has said that it was Dupree who gave him his first guitar. His father, on the other hand, did not support his son’s musical enthusiasm. One of Richards’ first guitar heroes was Scotty Moore.
Richards attended Wentworth Primary School with Mick Jagger and was his neighbor until 1954, when the family moved. From 1955 to 1959 he attended Dartford Technical High School for Boys.
Recruited by Dartford Tech’s choirmaster, R. W. “Jake” Clare, Richards sang in a trio of boy sopranos at, among other occasions, Westminster Abbey for Queen Elizabeth II.
In 1959 Richards was expelled from Dartford Tech for truancy and transferred to Sidcup Art College, where he met Dick Taylor.. At Sidcup he began playing guitar with other students in the boys’ room. At this point Richards had learned most of Chuck Berry’s solos.
Richards met Mick Jagger on a train as Jagger was heading for classes at the London School of Economics. The mail-order rhythm & blues albums from Chess Records by Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters that Jagger was carrying revealed a mutual interest and led to a renewal of their friendship.
Along with mutual friend Dick Taylor, Jagger was singing in an amateur band: Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys, which Richards soon joined. The Blues Boys folded when Brian Jones, after sharing thoughts on their joint interest in the blues music, invited Mick and Keith to the Bricklayers Arms pub, where they then met Ian Stewart.
By mid-1962 Richards had left Sidcup Art College to devote himself to music and moved into a London flat with Jagger and Jones. The Rolling Stones signed to Decca Records in 1963 and their band manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, dropped the s from Richards’ surname believing “Keith Richard” in his words “looked more pop”.
In the late 1970s Richards re-established the s in his surname.
Richards has been active as a music producer since the 1960s. He was credited as producer and musical director on the 1966 album Today’s Pop Symphony, one of their manager side projects, although there are doubts about how much Richards was actually involved with it.
On the Rolling Stones’ 1967 album the entire band was credited as producer, but since 1974, Richards and Mick Jagger have frequently co-produced Rolling Stones’ and other artists’ records under the name “The Glimmer Twins”, often in collaboration with other producers.
Since the 1980s Richards has chalked up numerous production and co-production credits on projects with other artists including Aretha Franklin and Ronnie Spector, as well as on his own albums with the X-Pensive Winos. Waddy Wahtel, Boby Keys, Ivan Neville and Charley Drayton are all also members of X-Pensive Winos.
Richards has released few solo recordings. His first solo single released in 1978 was versions of Chuck Berry’s “Run Rudolph Run”. A third album from Richards, Crosseyed Heart was released in September 2015.