How 'Brown Sugar' Came from a Redlands Jam and Drew on Slave Trade History

The riff that kicks off “Brown Sugar” was born during a loose jam at Keith Richards’s Redlands estate in early 1969. Richards had the chord pattern, Mick Jagger started humming a melody, and within an hour the basic structure was down. But the lyrics came later, and they weren’t just random rock ’n’ roll wordplay—Jagger deliberately pulled from real slave-trade imagery.

Jagger had been reading about the transatlantic slave trade, specifically the transport of Africans to sugar plantations in the American South and the Caribbean. Lines like “Gold Coast slave ship bound for cotton fields” and “scarred old slaver knows he’s doing alright” reference the route from West Africa to the Americas. The “brown sugar” itself is a double entendre—both raw cane sugar and a Black woman, with the song’s narrator speaking from the perspective of a slave owner. The reference to “hear