The Rolling Stones

The Rolling Stones began as a fan club with instruments. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards — childhood acquaintances reunited on a Dartford train platform in 1961 because Jagger was carrying Chess and Chuck Berry LPs — joined Brian Jones, who named the band from Muddy Waters’s “Rollin’ Stone.” Their early sets were Chicago blues and Chuck Berry, studied note-for-note from records; their 1964 pilgrimage to Chess Studios in Chicago, where they recorded with their heroes’ engineer, was the apprenticeship made literal (Richards 2010).

That same year their cover of Willie Dixon’s “Little Red Rooster” — a Howlin’ Wolf record, slide guitar intact — went to number one in Britain: Delta-rooted blues at the top of the pop chart, twenty-six years after Robert Johnson died unknown. The Stones used their leverage openly, insisting Howlin’ Wolf appear with them on US television in 1965 and touring with B.B. King and Ike & Tina Turner.

From “Satisfaction” onward they were the blues’ loudest export business — original songs built on the Chess chassis, sustained for sixty years. In this web they anchor the British blues node: the proof of how directly the Chicago sound seeded rock’s second generation, and the sharpest case study in who profits when a music crosses the color line and the Atlantic at once.