How Grandpa Gus' Jazz Records Led Keith Richards to Open Tunings

The most interesting thing here is that Keith Richards didn’t learn open tunings from blues or folk players — he got the idea from listening to his grandfather Gus Dupree’s big band and jazz records. Gus was a dance-band musician himself, and young Keith would sit in his living room absorbing records by Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, and other swing-era orchestras. That sound got him thinking about the guitar differently: not as a lead instrument, but as part of the rhythm section, something that could fill out the sound the way a horn section or a pianist’s left hand does.

Open tunings (like Open G, which Keith uses on “Honky Tonk Women” and “Start Me Up”) let him play full chords without barre shapes, using only a few fingers — leaving his hand free to play rhythmic patterns that lock with the drums. In his memoir Life, he says the tuning came from trying to get “the sound of a piano” out of a guitar, or to mimic the voicings he heard on those old big band records. It wasn’t about being flashy; it was about getting a fat, churning rhythm that could fill a room the way a brass section did in his grandfather’s collection.

So the direct link is: jazz and big band records taught Keith that the guitar could be a polyphonic, perc