From Dylan Folk to Samba Satan: How 'Sympathy for the Devil' Found Its Groove

Mick Jagger originally wrote “Sympathy for the Devil” as a slow, acoustic folk song in the style of Bob Dylan—complete with fingerpicked guitar and a weary, conversational vocal. The early demo, known as “Fallen Angels,” had the narrator listing off historical atrocities with a detached, almost plaintive tone. But during the Beggars Banquet sessions, the band scrapped that version entirely after Keith Richards and Brian Jones pushed for something with more rhythmic attack.

Jagger’s original concept for the narrator was less about a pitchfork-wielding tempter and more about a weary, urbane observer who happens to be the Devil—a character who has witnessed humanity’s worst moments firsthand. The narrator was inspired by the occult writer Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita and Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, but Jagger added a twist: the Devil is asking for sympathy because he’s been misunderstood. The shift from folk to samba-rock came when Jagger heard a Brazilian percussion track in the studio; he replaced the acoustic strumming with a hypnotic conga beat, turning the song into a carnivalesque confession. The final lyric “Who killed the Kennedys? After all, it was you and me” gives that cosmopolitan voice a chilling intimacy—the devil is not just Lucifer; he’s everyone willing to look away.