How Brian Jones’s Dulcimer on 'Lady Jane' Gave Aftermath Its Renaissance Soul

The track is “Lady Jane,” and the dulcimer wasn’t just a cool sound—it was Brian Jones’s way of pulling the band into a whole different century. He’d picked up the Appalachian dulcimer (sometimes called a hammered dulcimer, though technically it’s plucked) and taught himself to play it in a Renaissance style, inspired by Elizabethan lute music and the folk revival happening in England at the time. Jones loved exotic and old instruments—sitar, marimba, recorder—and for Aftermath he wanted to escape the standard blues-rock guitar setup.

The inspiration came from two directions. First, Jones was obsessed with the sound of early music—bands like The Incredible String Band and pentatonic folk scales were floating around the London scene. Second, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had written “Lady Jane” as a kind of courtly love poem (the title references Jane Seymour, Henry VIII’s third wife), so Brian’s dulcimer gave it that dusty, historical feel. The result was one of the strangest and most delicate tracks in the Stones’ catalog—a pop song that sounds like it was plucked from a 16th-century manuscript.