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Rolling Stones songs: Down Home Girl
*Click for MORE ROLLING STONES SONGS 1962-PRESENT

And every time you move like that/ I gotta go to Sunday mass…

Written by: Leiber/Butler
Recorded: RCA Studios, Hollywood, USA, Nov. 2-3 1964
Guest musicians: Jack Nitzsche (piano)
*Data taken from Martin Elliott’s book THE ROLLING STONES COMPLETE RECORDING SESSIONS 1962-2012

From the The Rolling Stones – All the Songs book:
“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”