How Skip James's 1931 Recordings Shaped Keith Richards' Guitar on 'Love in Vain'

During the Let It Bleed sessions in 1969, Keith Richards was deep into early Delta blues reissues. The specific Skip James albums he played constantly were Skip James: 1931 (Biograph) and The Complete 1931 Session (Yazoo) – compilations of James’s pre-war Paramount recordings. Richards was particularly taken with James’s eerie fingerpicking and his use of open D minor tuning.

The Rolling Stones’ cover of Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain” didn’t directly borrow from Johnson’s original arrangement. Instead, Richards adapted a finger