The Backstory of 'Brown Sugar' — Jagger's Late Regret and How the Verses Came Together

The most arresting thing about “Brown Sugar” is that its writer, Mick Jagger, spent decades defending it before abruptly calling it “a mess” and pulling it from live sets in 2021. He wrote the lyrics in 1969 on a farm outside Sydney during the Let It Bleed sessions, tossing together images of slave ships, interracial sex, and heroin (the song was originally about “brown sugar” as slang for the drug). The verses tumble out as a stream-of-consciousness collage: the 17th-century cargo of African captives, a plantation master raping a field hand (“hear him whip the women just around midnight”), and a present-day groupie who “taste[s] so good.”

Jagger later claimed he never saw the song as a political statement — just a “blend of all the nasty subjects” that excited him as a writer. But by 2021 he admitted he’d lost any comfort with the lyrics, saying the song “doesn’t reflect the way I think now.” He and Keith Richards had written the music first, a classic Stones riff in open G, and Jagger filled in the vocal melody and words quickly, almost as a joke. The result fifty years later was a hit that he couldn’t bring himself to sing anymore.