Brian Jones's Blues Obsession Shaped the Rolling Stones' Debut Album

Before Jagger and Richards became the face of the band, Brian Jones was the leader. He was the obsessive blues scholar who placed the classified ad that brought the core members together. For the debut album, Jones essentially acted as the band’s in-house curator—he knew the obscure Chess and Chicago sides that London kids had never heard, and he pushed the band to cover them raw.

The first album is almost entirely covers, and Brian directly selected the blueprints for songs like “I Need You Baby (Mona)” (Bo Diddley), “Carol” (Chuck Berry), “Route 66” (Bobby Troup), and “I Just Want to Make Love to You” (Willie Dixon). He also arranged the slide guitar parts and played harmonica on tracks like “I Can’t Be Satisfied”—bringing that Delta slide tone straight into a British R&B record. Without Jones’s crate-digging obsession, the album would have been a lot more polite.