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“Down Home Girl” was written by Jerry Leiber and Arthur Butler, two great shapers of the musical revolution of the fifties and sixties. The first collaborated with Mike Stoller on a number of hits for Elvis Presley, the Drifters, and the Coasters, while Butler was the singer with the Impressions (with Curtis Mayfield) as well as a renowned songwriter. The expression down home is used to describe a person with qualities associated with the rural Southern states. The heroine of the song, a “natural girl,” comes from the Deep South, New Orleans to be precise.
She may smell of turnip greens but she is a fine-looking woman who moves in such a sensual way that men gotta get down and pray and go to Sunday mass. Alvin Robinson was the first to record a version of “Down Home Girl,” just a few months before the Stones. Keith Richards remembers how the group came to choose this song: “Andrew and I walked into the Brill Building, the Tin Pan Alley of US song, to try and see the great Jerry Leiber, but Jerry Leiber wouldn’t see us. Someone recognized us and took us in and played us all these songs, and we walked out with ‘Down Home Girl.’ As simple as that”.
