It begins not with a guitar, but with a cowbell. A single, clunky, slightly off-kilter beat, struck by a man who was not even in the band, and then Keith Richards’ guitar riff comes swaggering in behind it, and Mick Jagger starts telling you about a gin-soaked bar-room queen in Memphis. When the Rolling Stones released “Honky Tonk Women” in July 1969, it was the sound of a band reinventing itself in public, in the middle of the strangest and saddest summer of its life. Within weeks it was number one on both sides of the Atlantic. More than half a century later, it is still the first song most people think of when they think of the Stones at their peak: loose, loud, funny, a little dangerous, and impossible to sit still to. The story of “Honky Tonk Women” is the story of a country song written on a ranch in Brazil, a band falling apart and coming back together in a London studio, and a cowbell that changed rock and roll.
To understand why the record mattered, you have to understand where the Rolling Stones stood in the summer of 1969. They were not newcomers, and they were not yet the institution they would become. They were the most notorious band in Britain, coming off a run of extraordinary records — “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and Beggars Banquet in 1968 had pulled them back from psychedelic drift toward the blues and country roots that suited them best — and they were also a band in crisis. Their founding guitarist, Brian Jones, had drifted away from the group, unreliable and unwell, and in June 1969 he was formally out, replaced by the 20-year-old Mick Taylor from John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. The band had not toured Britain since 1966 and had a huge free concert planned in Hyde Park for July 5. On July 3, two days before that concert, Jones was found dead in the swimming pool at his home in Sussex. He was 27. The single the band had just finished was released in Britain the very next day. Nobody planned it that way, but “Honky Tonk Women” arrived as both a comeback and an elegy — the sound of a new Stones being born in the week the old Stones lost a founder.
The song itself began far from London, on a ranch in Brazil. Jagger and Richards spent the turn of the year, from late December 1968 into early January 1969, on holiday at a ranch in Matão, in the state of São Paulo, and the local cowboys — the caipiras of rural Brazil — and the country music the two men were listening to at the time got into the writing. Richards later said Hank Williams came to mind, and that they were talking about old country songs; the song they sketched was, in Richards’ own description, a real Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers-style country song from the 1930s. The narrator meets his women the way a travelling man does: a dancing girl in a western bar in Memphis, and a divorcée in New York City. It was, in its first form, a dusty, mournful country tune — and if you want to hear that original idea, you can, because the band eventually released it. The country version, retitled “Country Honk,” appeared on Let It Bleed in December 1969, complete with fiddle, a car horn at the start, and a looser, front-porch feel. The hit single and the album track are the same song wearing two different suits, and the distance between them is the whole story of what happened in a London studio in the spring of 1969.
The transformation happened at Olympic Studios in London, where the band recorded the electric version in May and June 1969, with Jimmy Miller producing. The details of those sessions have become legend, and most of them are true. The track opens with a cowbell because the rhythm was not quite sitting right, and Miller himself stepped in and played the cowbell part — a producer’s beat, slightly stumbling, that Charlie Watts then followed, giving the record its lopsided, rolling gait. Ian Stewart, the band’s original pianist and eternal conscience, played piano. Horns by Steve Gregory and Bud Beadle added the brassy swagger. And Richards played the riff in open G tuning, with the low E string removed — the five-string tuning that would define his sound for the rest of his career, a tuning that makes a guitar ring like a bell and snarl like a bar fight at the same time. The new guitarist, Mick Taylor, played on the track too; Richards later credited Taylor with throwing the song off the wall into a completely different feel, though Taylor himself modestly recalled that the song was more or less complete by the time he arrived and added his overdubs. Brian Jones, meanwhile, had been present at the earliest “Country Honk” sessions in London in early 1969, and may have played on the first takes; those sessions were his last with the band. There is one disputed footnote worth mentioning honestly rather than settling: guitarist Ry Cooder, who was around the sessions, later claimed he originated the song’s main riff, a claim Richards has denied. The credit on the record, then and now, reads Jagger–Richards, and this article does not adjudicate the argument — it simply notes that the riff, whoever first played it, became one of the most imitated sounds in rock.
The single’s chart story was a triumph, and it is worth telling precisely, because the numbers show how completely the record connected. “Honky Tonk Women” was released in Britain on July 4, 1969 — the day after Brian Jones died — backed with “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” and a week later in the United States, on July 11. It was a non-album single, though it was included on the compilation Through the Past, Darkly (Big Hits Vol. 2) that September. In Britain it reached number one and stayed there for five weeks, across a seventeen-week chart run, and it remains, to this day, the band’s last single to reach number one in their home country. In America it entered the Billboard Hot 100 at number 79 on the chart dated July 19, 1969, broke into the Top 10 by August 2, and reached number one on August 23, where it stayed for four weeks — the fifth of the band’s eight American number ones, and, as one later survey noted, the longest stay at the top the band would ever enjoy in the US. It spent fifteen weeks on the Hot 100 in total, eleven of them in the Top 10, and Billboard ranked it the number four song of 1969 overall. It also topped the charts in Australia, Denmark, Ireland, New Zealand and Switzerland, and reached number two in Canada and Germany. For a song that began as a country sketch on a Brazilian ranch, that is a remarkable journey.
Its afterlife began almost immediately, and in the most public way possible. On July 5, 1969, the day after the British release, the Stones played the free concert in Hyde Park before a crowd estimated in the hundreds of thousands. Mick Taylor made his live debut with the band that day, Jagger read Shelley for Brian Jones, and “Honky Tonk Women” was the sound of the new line-up announcing itself. Two days of mourning and celebration, collapsed into one weekend, and the single at number one while it happened. The song then became what it has remained ever since: a permanent fixture of the Stones’ concerts, played on every tour for more than half a century, the moment in the show when the band stops being an institution and becomes, again, a bar band with a cowbell. Its honours accumulated more slowly but just as surely. Rolling Stone ranked it number 116 on its 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list, and in 2014 it was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. It turned up, decades later, in the video game Band Hero, introducing the riff to players who had never bought a Stones record. And its twin, “Country Honk,” kept the other half of the story alive: the fiddle part by Byron Berline — who later said Gram Parsons was responsible for him getting the job — was recorded, on producer Glyn Johns’ suggestion, with Berline playing on the pavement outside the studio for atmosphere, while tour manager Sam Cutler performed the car horn that opens the track. Two versions, one song, and between them the whole range of the band: the barroom and the front porch, the swagger and the sigh.
There is a final pleasure in the story, and it belongs to the timing. “Honky Tonk Women” is often described as a party song, and it is, but it arrived at a moment when nobody in the band much felt like a party. The week it came out contained a death, a funeral’s worth of grief, a new guitarist’s debut, and a free concert for a quarter of a million people. The record did not pretend any of that had not happened; it simply insisted, with a cowbell and a riff, that the band would keep playing. That is why it still works, more than fifty years later, for listeners who have never bought a Stones album and never will. It is not the band’s most profound song — “Gimme Shelter,” from the same era, has the darkness — and it is not their most famous riff. It is the one that tells the truth about what the Rolling Stones actually were at their best: a group of musicians who could take a country song from Brazil, run it through a London studio, lose a founding member in the middle of it, and still come out with three minutes of pure, shambling joy. The charts gave it four weeks at number one in America and five in Britain. The band gave it a permanent place in the set list. And the cowbell, struck by a producer because the drums would not quite sit right, gave it the first sound anyone remembers — the sound of a band walking into a bar, in Memphis or New York or anywhere else, and deciding, against all the odds of that summer, to stay and play.
That is why “Honky Tonk Women” still works, for a listener in a bar or a car or a stadium, more than fifty years after the week it was released. It is the sound of a band that had every reason to fall apart and chose, instead, to make its loosest, funniest, most confident record. The country song from Brazil became a rock and roll standard. The new guitarist found his place. The old guitarist was mourned, and then the show went on — because that is what the song itself is about, in the end: moving on, from town to town, from woman to woman, from one version of yourself to the next, with a riff to carry you and a cowbell to keep time. The charts gave it number one on both sides of the Atlantic. History gave it something rarer: the status of the Stones’ last British number one, and the first sound of the band that would dominate rock for the next decade.
Watch the video below and listen for the cowbell before anything else. It is the sound of a country song turning into a rock and roll anthem — and of a band, in the hardest week of its life, finding exactly the beat it needed to keep going.