(Credits: Far Out / Bent Rej)
Wed 29 October 2025 11:24, UK
In the halls of rock ‘n’ roll’s fabled mansion, there is one man who has seemingly peed in every corner of the gaff. Keith Richards hasn’t just dominated The Rolling Stones since their inception in the 1960s but made a good claim at becoming the ultimate rock guitar hero.
He is every bit the icon one might hope a rock guitarist to be. He is guttural in his performance, shimmying with his riffs and utterly unstoppable when it comes to off-stage partying. But while the decadent nature of his legacy is something many people have come to cherish most of all, the truth is, Keef, as he is affectionately known, is a hell of a guitar player.
As one of the greatest guitarists in the rock canon, Keith Richards knows a thing or two about musicianship. But while so many of his counterparts were concerned with noodling away on solos or trying to grab the spotlight from their singers, Richards went about grabbing the greatest riffs in the world and stuffing them into his songs, like a bandit on the run, piling dollars into a suitcase.
With The Rolling Stones, he helped define the sound of British pop music while curating a persona that would come to define our understanding of rock stardom. His virtuosic fingerstyle technique and incorporation of drones betrayed a passion for classic blues and rock ‘n’ roll artists such as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Jimmy Cliff. But, according to Planet Rock, there was only one guitarist he was willing to call unique.
When asked to choose some of his favourite blues records in a recent interview, Richards was quick to name Jimmy Reed’s 1956 single ‘You Got Me Dizzy’. “He was totally unique amongst even all of the other 1950s and ’60s bluesmen out of Chicago,” Keith began. “He is such a distinctive sound. It was almost as if he was laying out to you. Like ‘Look, it’s really not hard to do. You’ve just got to relax and get into it’.”
(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Richards is right. ‘You Got My Dizzy’ is astoundingly simple. Reed plays a sparse 12-bar blues riff over a shuffle beat. There’s no soloing, no displays of vocal dexterity, just groove-laden blues for three glorious minutes. That’s exactly the kind of wonderment that gets richards excited. Famous for demanding he have “roll” with his rock, Richards is a groovemaster.
“Such a simplicity of sound,” Richards continued, “So stark and at the same time such an underlying humour in it. Which is why I picked ‘You Got Me Dizzy’, because he just flings this thing around and is just so beautifully natural.
There is no pretension about it. I love Jimmy Reed, a unique sound. There are thousands and thousands of Blues players out there and to find a unique sound and a way to play it is an extra touch of genius. Jimmy Reed had it.”
Reed certainly did have it. Born in Dunleith, Mississippi, in 1925, Jimmy Reed learned to play the guitar under the tutelage of self-taught electric guitar master Eddie Taylor. After years of honing his craft on street corners, Reed moved to the blues capital of America at the time, Chicago, Illinois. The Second World War broke out shortly afterwards, and he was drafted into the US Navy, putting an end to his musical ambitions.
On his return, he got a job in a meatpacking plant, but by 1950 he’d managed to establish himself as a popular musician, singing to Vee-Jay Records after failing to woo Chess. Over the next few years, he released some of the most influential blues recordings of all time, including ‘Honest I Do (1957)’, ‘Baby What You Want Me to Do’ and Big Boss Man’ (1961).
Make sure you check out ‘You’ve Got Me Dizzy’ below.
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