(Credits: Far Out / Nationaal Archief)
Fri 24 October 2025 10:28, UK
Despite having formed as an ensemble troupe of electric blues fanatics led by enigmatic multi-instrumentalist Brian Jones, another member had stepped forward and taken the limelight for himself by the time The Rolling Stones started releasing music in 1963. Mick Jagger’s vocals would be at the forefront of every single the Stones released for the next 60 years.
And he did a good job of it, too. While the group did extremely well marketing themselves as some form of rock and roll pirate ship, sailing from port to port and enthralling every townsperson who so happened to glance up at their Jolly Roger, Jagger was always undoubtedly the ship’s captain. The mouthpiece of the band in more ways than one.
It would take someone special to outsing Jagger on a song carrying his band’s signature sound. And that someone arrived in the middle of the night at Sunset Sound Recorders studio on October 17th, 1969. “The use of the female voice was the producer’s idea,” Jagger wrote in the book According to the Rolling Stones in 2003. He was referring to Jimmy Miller, who’d been their producer on the album Beggars Banquet the previous year. “It would be one of those moments along the lines of, ‘I hear a girl on this track – get one on the phone.’”
And so they did. Around midnight, the band’s pianist, Jack Nietzsche, called in a favour with a session singer he knew who’d once been in Ray Charles’ backing band, The Raelettes. At just 20 years of age, this spur-of-the-moment recording gig was the biggest moment of her professional life. And she didn’t know it at the time, but she’d go down in rock and roll legend because of it.
It was a big call, no less because it hadn’t been a part of the band’s original motif. To bring in a female vocalist always ran the risk of upstaging Jagger. But it seemed essential to the track that the gorup sought the tender vocals of a female.
The only problem was that this “girl” was in no fit state to be called into the studio at one in the morning. Merry Clayton was in her second trimester of pregnancy and needed all the sleep she could get. She certainly didn’t need to be straining her body and vocal chords to the limit in the early hours in the service of one of the hardest blues rock numbers the Stones had ever recorded.
What was the song, then?
The Rolling Stones were doing vocal overdubs on the opening track of their new album Let It Bleed. They’d started recording ‘Gimme Shelter’ eight months earlier, but it would be the last song they’d complete before releasing the record. Clayton arrived at Sunset Sound in her pyjamas and curlers and recorded the song’s most famous moment in just two takes.
“Rape, murder, it’s just a shot away,” she cries, her voice breaking in a thunderclap that befits the horror depicted in the lyrics perfectly. Her late-night exertions would tragically cost her the baby she was carrying. Nevertheless, although it did nothing to bring back her unborn baby, her legacy in music history was sealed.
Since Clayton, multiple other soul singers have achieved worldwide recognition through their performance of ‘Gimme Shelter’ alongside Jagger during The Rolling Stones’ live shows. Most notably, Lisa Fischer, who toured with the Stones for 26 years between 1989 and 2015. She was succeeded by Sasha Allen, and Chanel Haynes is currently the female vocalist behind the mic.
The track remains one of the band’s most potent efforts. It streaks out of the airwaves like it owes you money, and rarely stops for breath as it pounds away at your brain. It’s a song that, despite its age, still feels like a fresh punch of brutal blues.
Given the success of having a female singer duet with their frontman on ‘Gimme Shelter’, it’s natural to assume there have been other instances in which The Rolling Stones have made use of the same vocal dynamic in the five decades that have elapsed since. Yet the song remains the solitary case in which a Stones recording has a woman on lead vocals. For that reason, it continues to be an even bigger highlight in virtually every show they play.
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