News The Rolling Stones song Mick Jagger made up on the spot
Prior to the 1960s, much of the songwriting in popular music seemed to be inspired by life’s most powerful emotions: love, pain, jealousy or melancholy, the last three usually relating to the first. When bands like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones set out, inspired by the rock ‘n’ roll legends of the 1950s, their music invariably addressed prospective or deceitful lovers; however, in the mid-60s, things began to change.
Throughout the mid-20th century, literature, fine art and music flourished through the gates of a modern renaissance. The first domino seemed to fall in the world of literature thanks to pioneering poets and authors of the so-called Beat Generation, who revolutionised orthodox storytelling practices to invigorate the imagination.
William S. Burroughs, for example, pioneered a method for creating new ideas called the ‘cut-up technique’ wherein words from books, newspapers or one’s own writing were cut up and rearranged to inspire a new path for creative exploits.
In the late 1960s, The Rolling Stones had finally unshackled themselves from the confines of their earlier years’ rhythm and blues covers and were also looking to create fresh ideas for their songwriting.
The fruitful songwriting partnership of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had found its footing by the end of the 1960s, with an impressive cache of several number-one hits already securing an immortal legacy.
Although most of the classic Jagger/Richards compositions held tangible meanings and narratives, Jagger mixed things up on the lyric front from time to time. In the 2010 documentary Stones in Exile, the charismatic frontman was seen employing Burroughs’ cut-up method to write lyrics for the 1972 album Exile on Main Street.
Jagger also found some random words at the back of his mind when writing ‘Jiving Sister Fanny’, a lesser-known Stones track recorded in 1969. The first verse reads, “Jivin’ Sister / Fanny, told her man from / Philadelphia, PA, uh, huh, huh, huh / He tore down the station said she didn’t / Like the way we played, uh, huh, huh, huh”.
Jagger allegedly wrote the song as he sang on the spot – of this, I have no doubt. After continuing for three further verses, Jagger abandoned the impromptu song merited only by Mick Taylor’s lead work. All the same, the band never intended to release ‘Jiving Sister Fanny’, but it was eventually released in 1975 as part of the unauthorised compilation album Metamorphosis.
