Keith Richards
| Keith Richards | |
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Richards performing with the Rolling Stones in 1972
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| Background information | |
| Born |
18 December 1943 Dartford, Kent, England |
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| Instruments | Guitar |
| Years active | 1960–present |
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| Associated acts |
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| Website | keithrichards |
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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."
Richards was born 18 December 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", whilst Eliza also became mayor of the Municipal Borough of Walthamstow in London in 1941. His great-grandfather's family originated from Wales.
His maternal grandfather, Augustus Theodore "Gus" Dupree, who toured Britain with a jazz big band, Gus Dupree and his Boys, fostered Richards' interest in guitar. Richards has said that it was Dupree who gave him his first guitar. His grandfather ‘teased’ the young Richards with a guitar that was on a shelf that Richards couldn’t reach at the time. Finally Dupree told Richards, that if Richards could reach the guitar then he could have it. Richards then devised all manner of ways of reaching the guitar, putting books and cushions on a chair and finally got the guitar and his grandfather let him have it. His grandfather taught him the rudiments of Richards' first tune, “Malagueña”. He worked on the number ‘like mad’ and then his grandfather let him keep the guitar. He called it ‘the prize of the century’. Richards played at home, listening to recordings by Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and others. His father, on the other hand, disparaged his son's musical enthusiasm. One of Richards' first guitar heroes was Scotty Moore.
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Wikipedia