Keith Richards
| Birth Name | Keith Richards |
|---|---|
| Born | 18 December 1943 Dartford, Kent, England |
| Age | 76 Years |
| Genres | Rock, blues, blues rock, rock and roll, rhythm and blues |
| Instruments | Guitar, vocals, bass guitar |
| Associated acts | The Rolling Stones, the X-Pensive Winos |
Keith Richards (born 18 December 1943) is an English musician, singer, and songwriter. He is best known as the co-founder, guitarist, secondary vocalist, and co-principal songwriter of the Rolling Stones. Rolling Stone magazine called Richards the creator of “rock’s greatest single body of riffs” on guitar and ranked him fourth on its list of 100 best guitarists in 2011. The magazine lists fourteen songs that Richards wrote with the Rolling Stones’ lead vocalist Mick Jagger on its “Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time” list.
Richards plays both lead and rhythm guitar parts, often in the same song, as the Stones are generally known for their guitar interplay of rhythm and lead (“weaving”) between Richards and the other guitarist in the band – Brian Jones (1962–1969), Mick Taylor (1969–1975), and Ronnie Wood (1975–present). In the recording studio, Richards sometimes plays all of the guitar parts, notably on the songs “Paint It Black”, “Ruby Tuesday”, “Sympathy for the Devil”, and “Gimme Shelter”. He is also a vocalist, singing backing vocals on many Rolling Stones songs as well as occasional lead vocals, such as on the Rolling Stones’ 1972 single “Happy”, as well as with his side project, the X-Pensive Winos.
Richards was born on 18 December 1943 at Livingston Hospital, in Dartford, Kent, England. He is the only child of Doris Maud Lydia (née Dupree) and Herbert William Richards. His father was a factory worker who was wounded in the Second World War during the Normandy invasion.:17–18 Richards’s paternal grandparents, Ernie, and Eliza Richards were socialists and civic leaders, whom he credited as “more or less creat[ing] the Walthamstow Labour Party”, and both were mayors of the Municipal Borough of Walthamstow in Essex, with Eliza becoming mayor in 1941. His great-grandfather’s family originated from Wales.
