How Keith Richards' riff from 'Beggars Banquet' became 'Brown Sugar' and why the Rolling Stones stopped playing it

Keith Richards first hit on that slinky, descending guitar riff during the Beggars Banquet sessions in 1968, but the song didn’t take shape until a year later when the Stones decamped to Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Alabama. They cut the basic track in one take on December 2, 1969 — Richards on a Fender Telecaster through a tiny amp, Mick Taylor on a Gibson Les Paul, and a borrowed saxophonist named Bobby Keys blowing the solo that same night. The raw energy of that session became the single that launched Sticky Fingers in 1971.

The lyrics, written by Mick Jagger, are a dense jumble: a slave ship arriving from Africa, the “brown sugar” as a metaphor for both a Black woman and heroin, oral sex in a backstreet, and the “old slave master” auctioning off flesh. Jagger later said he found the historical framing compelling but clumsy, and by the 2010s he’d acknowledged the lyrics were “nasty” and “oversimplified.” Radio stations in the U.S. and U.K. initially played it without much fuss — the song hit number one on