Keith Richards’ Delta Blues Obsession: How Robert Johnson’s Slide Tuning Shaped ‘Love in Vain’

By 1970, Keith Richards had been chasing Robert Johnson’s ghost for years. The Delta bluesman’s 1936 recordings—especially the open-tuned slide work on cuts like “Cross Road Blues” and “Traveling Riverside Blues”—became Richards’ private Rosetta Stone. He once said Johnson’s guitar sounded like a whole band, and he wanted that same density from a single instrument.

When the Stones decided to cover “Love in Vain” for Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!, they didn’t just copy Johnson’s arrangement. Richards dropped into open G (tuning his guitar to D-G-D-G-B-D, often with a capo at the third fret) and played slide with a bottleneck, exactly the way Johnson would have. But he added his own twist: instead of Johnson’s fingerpicked, lonesome texture, Richards strummed the open strings hard, letting them ring into each other. The result was a churning, almost orchestral slide figure that drove the Stones’ live version—less fragile than the original,