How Gus Dupree Gave Keith Richards His First Lessons in Rebellion and Rhythm

Keith Richards didn’t learn guitar from his grandfather, but Theodore Augustus “Gus” Dupree taught him something just as essential: how to hear music like a troublemaker. Gus was a jazz saxophonist and fiddle player who toured with dance bands and kept a massive record collection that introduced young Keith to the sounds of Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, and early blues players. When Keith moved in with his grandparents for a stretch during childhood, Gus’s living room became his first real classroom — not for scales or chords, but for the idea that music was something you lived and felt, not just practiced.

Beyond the records, Gus personified a certain kind of defiant independence that Keith would later wear as a badge. Gus was a hard-drinking, fiercely nonconformist man who didn’t care much for authority or convention. He once told Keith, “Never follow the leader — you won’t know where he’s going.” That attitude stuck. Richards has often said his grandfather’s refusal to bow to anyone shaped his own approach to both life and rock and roll, from the way he dressed to the way he built riffs. So while it wasn’t Gus who put a guitar in Keith’s hands (that was his mother), it was Gus who showed him that music was as much about attitude as it was about notes.