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Read Keith Richards’ foreword to Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters book

*By author Robert Gordon; Little, Brown and Company, 2002

There’s a reason Muddy Waters still feels electric decades later—his music doesn’t just sound raw, it reveals something raw in us. In his foreword to Can’t Be Satisfied, Keith Richards reframes the blues not as a genre, but as a release valve for the darker side of human emotion. Through a chance reconnection with Mick Jagger, that sound hit Richards like a revelation, shaping not only his musical path but the very identity of The Rolling Stones. What begins as admiration becomes something deeper—a realization that the blues isn’t just heard, it’s lived, shared, and transformed.

“There’s a demon in me. I think there’s a demon in everyone, a dark piece in us all. And the blues is a recognition of that and the ability to express it and make fun out of it, have joy out of that dark stuff. When you listen to Muddy Waters, you can hear all of the angst and all of the power and all of the hardship that made that man. But Muddy let it out through music, set the feeling loose in the air. The blues makes me feel better. I heard Muddy through Mick Jagger.

We were childhood friends, hadn’t seen each other for a few years, and I met him on a train around 1961. He had a Chuck Berry record and The Best of Muddy Waters. I was going to mug the guy for the Chuck Berry because I wasn’t familiar with Muddy. We started talking, went ’round to his house, and he played me Muddy and I said, ‘Wow. Again.’ And about ten hours later, I was still going, ‘Okay, again.’ When I got to Muddy and heard ‘Still a Fool’ and ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’–that is the most powerful music I’ve ever heard. The most expressive.

He named us in a way, and we basically wanted to turn the world on to Muddy and his like. This little band of ours had finally found a gig, and we put our last few pennies in for this ad in a magazine. We called to tell them where we were playing at and they said, “Well what’s your name?” And on the floor was The Best of Muddy Walers and on the first side was “Rollin’ Stone.” So we named ourselves The Rolling Stones.

I always felt that Muddy ran the band, that there was a real connection. What Muddy was doing at Chess in the late forties and in the fifties was transforrning the blues to meet the needs of the society. It had been acoustic blues before World War II; after that, they started shouting it out in Chicago. The whole city was louder, and the music became city blues. They were inventing it as they went along because nobody knew anything about the electric guitar or how to record it. It was just beautiful experimentation.

Muddy was like a map, he was really the key to all of the other stuff. I found out Muddy and Chuck were working out of the same studio and on the same Chess label, and there was the Willie Dixon connection too. Then I had to find everything of Muddy’s that I could and at the same time find where Muddy got it from, so I sat and listened to Robert Lockwood Jr. and to cousins and relations. Via Muddy, I found Robert Johnson, and then it all started to make sense. (Ref. keith richards’ foreword)

Twentieth-century music is based on the blues. You wouldn’t have jazz or any other modern music without the blues. And therefore every song, no matter how trite or crass, has got a bit of the blues somewhere in it — even without them knowing, even though they’ve washed most of it out. This music got called the blues about a hundred years ago, but the music is about a feeling and feelings didn’t just start a hundred years ago.
Feelings start in the person and I think that’s why the blues is universal, because it’s part of everybody. Muddy is like a very comforting arm around the shoulder. You need that, you know? It can be dark down there, man.”

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