FREAKING NEWS: fame Jimmy, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards Recording…

No, they weren’t the most virtuosic instrumentalists of their time, but they were the right group arriving at the right time and delivering the right product.

We mustn’t, however, pile all of the praise on the shoulders of Paul McCartney and John Lennon or even Keith Richards and Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones.

In 2017, Tom Petty traced rock ‘n’ roll history while giving a speech in acceptance of his MusiCares.

He noted that after the outbreak of rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s, the American government “got very nervous,” especially the Republicans.

They put Elvis in the army, they put Chuck Berry in jail,” he said. “Things calmed down for a couple years, but it was too late, the music had reached England and they remembered it.

Subsequently, Petty admired The Beatles’ role in beginning the British invasion of the US carts with a pivotal performance on The Ed Sullivan Show, which incidentally inspired him to pursue a music career.

Indeed, The Beatles paved the way for fellow British bands like The Rolling Stones, The Kinks and The Who, but had they not broken America in February 1964, it is likely that one of these other bands would have taken their place.

By 1963, the resurgence of rock as part of a wider countercultural movement was already underway in the restless hand of Bob Dylan, and Britain was poised, ready to make its mark on post-war culture.

While the folk work of Woody Guthrie and  inspired Dylan’s transformative early material, the British invasion was inspired mostly by early rock stars like Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry and blues innovators like Muddy Waters and ’ Wolf.

When The Rolling Stones made their first moves in 1963, several other artists, including the legendary John , had begun bringing the blues to the UK.

The Stones, who derived their name from Muddy Waters’ song ‘Rollin’ Stone’, are often credited with truly bringing the blues to the UK because they landed the heaviest punch.

In December 1964, their cover of Willie Dixon’s ‘Little Red Rooster’ reached number one on the UK Singles Chart and remains the only blues song to achieve such a feat. Subsequently, The Stones  the blues tradition in their innovative and highly influential rock canon.

Though Jagger and Richards had attended primary school together as children, they first properly acquainted one another during a chance encounter on Platform Two at  Railway Station in 1961.

The subject of their first conversation was a pair of records Jagger held under his arm: ’ At The Hops by Chuck Berry and The Best of Muddy Waters.

Jagger and Richard had admired American blues artists for several years and shared aspirations of forming an R&B group. Shortly after meeting Jagger in ’61, Richards sent a letter to his aunt, in which he excitedly stated: “Mick is the greatest R&B singer this side of the Atlantic and I don’t mean maybe.

In the couple of years that preceded the formation of The Rolling Stones with early leader Brian Jones, Jagger and Richards immersed themselves in the UK’s emerging rhythm and blues scene. They performed together in the short-lived band Blues Incorporated and began to meet several like-minded musicians of their age group. Among them was the future  and Led Zeppelin founder Jimmy Page.

Before joining The , Page worked mainly as a session musician, a career that proved to be fruitful, both financially and in terms of networking. Before that, however, the teenage prodigy landed a position playing with Neil Christian & The Crusaders.

The band provided him with plenty of touring experience, but he became disheartened by a lack of blues material in their repertoire. “When you were playing dance halls, which we were, they just wanted Top 20 material,” he reflected in a 2020 conversation with Classic Rock.

But I was really keen to play the blues. When I say ‘the blues’, definitely the Chess [Records] catalogue, and it was in advance of everything that was going to come.

Page noted that, while “it was the Stones who really brought [the blues] into the spotlight,” The Crusaders “were in advance of that.” During the band’s visit to the American Folk Blues Festival in Manchester in 1962, Page met a pre-fame Jagger and Richards for the first time. “They didn’t have the Stones then, they were just blues enthusiasts on a pilgrimage, like all of us,” Page noted.

In 1962, the blues legend ’ Wolf released his eponymous second album, which met the ears of Jagger, Richards and Page at the same instance in Manchester. “We were in a house where the guy had just got the ’ Wolf album with the rocking chair on the cover. Nobody had heard it up until then, but we all heard it that day. So yes, that was one life-changing thing.”

’ Wolf’s distinctive vocal and innovative approach to the electric blues heavily inspired rock and roll innovations of the 1960s, from Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited to Led Zeppelin’s first couple of albums. Page’s bandmate Robert Plant was a particularly avid  ’ Wolf fan. “If I hadn’t heard the  ’ Wolf, Robert Johnson and Little Richard, I wouldn’t have been drawn  to music,” he once told USA Today.