(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sun 8 March 2026 20:00, UK
Everything that Keith Richards has ever played has been a love letter to all of his favourite American artists.
He didn’t need to overcomplicate things whenever he played with The Rolling Stones, but whenever he found the right blues lick from one of his heroes, he wanted to dissect it from every angle by the time he actually got onstage to play it. A lot of his favourite players were the ones that had music practically dripping off of them, but Richards knew when someone was bound to change the face of every other genre around them.
But when The Stones first began, there was no telling whether they would become the greatest rock band in the world or just another blues band out of England. They were students of the greatest names in blues, and even if they took their name from an old blues tune, there was a lot more to explore once Richards started writing tunes with Mick Jagger. Both of them had a fire in them, and a lot of the grittiness of their early songs is half the reason why they are still remembered today.
They were far more dangerous than bands like The Beatles looked, but when Richards started to voyage outside of rock and roll, he was amazed by everything else out there. Even if the band had one identifiable sound, you can hear bits and pieces of reggae in some of their tunes, moments where they started following trends like punk on ‘Respectable’, and even unashamedly try to outdo disco on ‘Miss You’. Not all of them were the best idea in the world, but Richards felt they couldn’t go wrong if they had tunes that came from the heart.
And while blues is always the starting point for heartfelt rock songs, you couldn’t get any more heartfelt than country music. The Stones weren’t exactly instant converts to the sounds of country and western, but whereas Jagger had a tough time doing justice to those kinds of songs, Richards fell in love the first time he heard songs by everyone from George Jones to Hank Williams.
These were the kind of openhearted tunes he wished he could write, but he wouldn’t have got there without the help of Gram Parsons. Even as the country rock world was starting to get born in California, Parsons was a walking encyclopedia for country music, and Richards seemed to walk away with a different idea every time they jammed, whether it was the genesis of ‘Wild Horses’ or just fiddling around with a few country songs in between recording Exile on Main St.
Even though Parsons wasn’t long for this world, Richards could tell that his influence was reaching much farther than what bands like Eagles were doing, saying, “His actual output — the number of records he made and sold — was pretty minimal. But his effect on country music is enormous. This is why we’re talking about him now. But we can’t know what his full impact could have been. Think of what stuff we could have looked forward to, and be hearing now. It would be phenomenal.”
While we’ll never know the kind of impact that Parsons might have had, those few records he did give us are turning points for what country rock would become. He had already started to change the landscape of California with Sweetheart of the Rodeo with The Byrds, but even after he passed away, Grievous Angel is still one of the most underappreciated country albums in the rock sphere.
Bands like Eagles may have come in and taken most of the glory, but even Don Henley would have told you that there are pieces of their sound that Parsons had put in there himself when he made his first records. There are many bands that try their best to make great records throughout their career, but what Parsons was doing reshaped American songwriting one tune at a time.