From folk demo to samba menace: The evolution of 'Sympathy for the Devil' during the Beggars Banquet sessions

Keith Richards first brought an acoustic folk riff to the studio—what Jagger had written as a slow, Bob Dylan–style number inspired by reading Baudelaire and Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. The original demo, recorded at Olympic Studios in May 1968, was a fingerpicked, almost plaintive piece with Jagger singing “I’m the devil” over a simple guitar figure. Nobody liked it much.

The transformation happened in the control room. Engineer Glyn Johns and producer Jimmy Miller suggested speeding it up and pushing into a samba groove. Watts locked into a loping beat with hi-hats, Richards switched to electric, and Bill Wyman dropped a hypnotic bass line. Brian Jones, in one of his final major contributions, overdubbed conga drums—sometimes frantic, sometimes precise—while Nicky Hopkins layered piano fills. Over multiple sessions, Jagger added his spoken verses and the “woo-woo” backing vocals, turning a minor folk experiment into a snarling six-minute epic that unnerved even the band.