Friday, January 27, 2017

Honky Tonk Woman Sheryl Crow with The Rolling Stones





Honky Tonk Women"


I met a gin soaked, bar-room queen in Memphis,
She tried to take me upstairs for a ride.
She had to heave me right across her shoulder
'Cause I just can't seem to drink you off my mind.

It's the honky tonk women
Gimme, gimme, gimme the honky tonk blues.

I laid a divorcee in New York City,
I had to put up some kind of a fight.
The lady then she covered me in roses,
She blew my nose and then she blew my mind.

It's the honky tonk women
Gimme, gimme, gimme the honky tonk blues.

(Yeah!) It's the honky tonk women.
Gimme, gimme, gimme the honky tonk blues.

(Yeah!) It's the honky tonk women.
Gimme, gimme, gimme the honky tonk blues.


"Honky Tonk Women" is a 1969 hit song by The Rolling Stones. Released as a single only release (although a country version was included on Let It Bleed), on 4 July 1969 in the United Kingdom and a week later in the United States, it topped the charts in both nations.

Inspiration and recording

The song was written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards while on holiday in Brazil from late December 1968 to early January 1969, inspired by Brazilian "caipiras" (inhabitants of rural, remote areas of parts of Brazil) at the ranch where Jagger and Richards were staying in Matão, São Paulo.Two versions of the song were recorded by the band: the familiar hit which appeared on the 45 single and their collection of late 1960s singles, Through the Past, Darkly (Big Hits Vol. 2); and a honky-tonk version entitled "Country Honk" with slightly different lyrics, which appeared on Let It Bleed (1969).

Thematically, a "honky tonk woman" refers to a dancing girl in a western bar who may work as a prostitute; the setting for the narrative in the first verse of the blues version is Memphis, Tennessee, while "Country Honk" sets the first verse in Jackson, Mississippi.


I met a gin soaked bar-room queen in Memphis

I'm sittin' in a bar, tippin' a jar in Jackson

The band initially recorded the track called "Country Honk", in London in early March 1969. Brian Jones was present during these sessions and may have played on the first handful of takes and demos. It was his last recording session with the band. The song was transformed into the familiar electric, riff-based hit single "Honky Tonk Women" sometime in the spring of 1969, prior to Mick Taylor's joining the group. In an interview in the magazine Crawdaddy!, Richards credits Taylor for influencing the track: "... the song was originally written as a real Hank Williams/Jimmie Rodgers/1930s country song. And it got turned around to this other thing by Mick Taylor, who got into a completely different feel, throwing it off the wall another way." However, in 1979 Taylor recalled it this way: "I definitely added something to Honky Tonk Women, but it was more or less complete by the time I arrived and did my overdubs."

"Honky Tonk Women" is distinctive as it opens not with a guitar riff, but with a beat played on a cowbell. The Rolling Stones' producer Jimmy Miller performed the cowbell for the recording.

The concert rendition of "Honky Tonk Women" on Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! (1970) differs significantly from the studio hit, with a markedly dissimilar guitar introduction and the first appearance on vinyl of an entirely different second verse.

Live visuals

During the North American leg of the 1989 Steel Wheels tour, a giant inflatable woman was cued to appear just before the first chorus. There was an animated live visual for this song when it was performed in concert around 2002 and 2003. It featured a topless woman riding on the Rolling Stones tongue who was seen in the beginning of the concert.
Release[edit]

The single was released in the UK the day after the death of founding member Brian Jones where it remained on the charts for 5 weeks peaking at No. 1. "You Can't Always Get What You Want" was the single's B-side. The song topped the US Billboard Hot 100 for four weeks from 23 August 1969. It was later released on the compilation album Through the Past, Darkly (Big Hits Vol. 2) in September. Billboard ranked it as the No. 4 song overall for 1969.

At the time of its release Rolling Stone hailed "Honky Tonk Women" as "likely the strongest three minutes of rock and roll yet released in 1969". It was ranked No. 116 on the list of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time in April 2010. The song was later put into the track listing for the video game Band Hero.

Personnel The Rolling Stones
Mick Jagger – lead vocals
Keith Richards – lead guitar (incl. solo), rhythm guitar, background vocals
Mick Taylor – lead guitar
Bill Wyman – bass
Charlie Watts – drumsAdditional personnel
Reparata and the Delrons – background vocals
Nanette Workman – background vocals (credited as "Nanette Newman")
Doris Troy – background vocals
Ian Stewart – piano
Jimmy Miller – cowbell
Steve Gregory and Bud Beadle – saxophones
Charts and certifications

Releases on compilation albums and live recordings

Concert versions of "Honky Tonk Women" are included on the albums 'Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out!' (recorded 1969, released 1970), Love You Live (recorded 1976, released 1977), Live Licks (recorded 2003, released 2004), Sweet Summer Sun: Hyde Park Live (2013), and Totally Stripped (recorded 1995, released 2016). The song has appeared in numerous Stones concert films and boxed sets, including Stones in the Park, Some Girls: Live In Texas '78, Let's Spend the Night Together, Stones at the Max, Voodoo Lounge Live, Bridges to Babylon Tour '97–98, Four Flicks, The Biggest Bang, and Sweet Summer Sun: Hyde Park Live.

Personnel

The Rolling Stones
Additional personnel


  • This song is about a prostitute - Mick Jagger would sometimes introduce it as being "a song for all the whores in the audience."

    Like many Rolling Stones songs, it has highly suggestive lyrics, but they are just subtle enough to keep it from getting banned by radio stations. British rock bands often wrote lyrics that were ambiguously offensive, falling just in line with BBC guidelines for airplay. A good example in this song is "She blew my nose and then she blew my mind," which implies both cocaine and sex, but didn't give the BBC any specific reason to ban it.
  • The Stones started recording this as a country song based on Hank Williams' "Honky Tonk Blues." They made it into a rocker for release as a single and released the country version, "Country Honk," a few months later on Let It Bleed.
  • Keith Richards: "'Honky Tonk Women' started in Brazil. Mick and I, Marianne Faithfull and Anita Pallenberg who was pregnant with my son at the time. Which didn't stop us going off to the Mato Grasso and living on this ranch. It's all cowboys. It's all horses and spurs. And Mick and I were sitting on the porch of this ranch house and I started to play, basically fooling around with an old Hank Williams idea. 'Cause we really thought we were like real cowboys. Honky tonk women. And we were sitting in the middle of nowhere with all these horses, in a place where if you flush the john all these black frogs would fly out. It was great. The chicks loved it. Anyway, it started out a real country honk put on, a hokey thing. And then couple of months later we were writing songs and recording. And somehow by some metamorphosis it suddenly went into this little swampy, black thing, a Blues thing. Really, I can't give you a credible reason of how it turned around from that to that. Except there's not really a lot of difference between white country music and black country music. It's just a matter of nuance and style. I think it has to do with the fact that we were playing a lot around with open tunings at the time. So we were trying songs out just to see if they could be played in open tuning. And that one just sunk in." >>
  • Lead guitarist Brian Jones was a founding member of the group and was considered their leader in their early years. Unfortunately, drug abuse made him pretty much worthless, and when The Stones finished recording this on June 8, 1969, they drove to his house and fired him. This was released July 3, 1969, the same day Jones was found dead in his swimming pool.
  • Mick Taylor had taken over for Brian Jones on lead guitar, and this was his first appearance on a Stones recording. Taylor claims he came up with the famous guitar riff, even though Richards plays it.
  • The distinctive cowbell used to open the song was played by producer Jimmy Miller. He set the tempo for the song by venturing into the studio and hitting the two small cowbells his had set up on a prong.
  • Young drummers often practice playing this song because it requires them to play different patterns at the same time with the hands and feet working independently.
  • Reparata & The Delrons, an early '60s girl group, sang the backup vocals.
  • There is no bass on the verses.
  • The single was given away to all the fans who helped clean up after The Stones free concert in Hyde Park on July 5, 1969. This was the first concert Mick Taylor played with the band. A life-size cutout of Brian Jones, who died three days earlier, was kept on stage and the show was dedicated to him.
  • The Stones played this at most of their live shows, usually with great theatrics. The Steel Wheels tour in 1989 featured giant inflatable women during the performance.
  • This was banned in China. When the group made arrangements to play there for the first time in 2003, they had to agree not to play this, "Brown Sugar," "Let's Spent The Night Together," and "Beast Of Burden." They ended up not playing because of a respiratory disease that was going around China.
  • Chrissie Hynde, the lead singer of The Pretenders, joined The Rolling Stones on stage in Leipzig on June 20, 2003 and sang this as a duet with Jagger.
  • Rick Nelson released a cover of this song on his 1971 album Rudy The Fifth. His version, which is in more a country style akin to "Country Honk," is the song that got him booed off the stage when he played a "Rock & Roll Revival" show that year at Madison Square Garden. Nelson had never played one of these nostalgia shows, and he thought he could play something new in his set. The crowd, there to hear the hits, didn't like it and let him know. The experience led Nelson to write "Garden Party," which became a hit song the following year and got his career back on track. In that song, he included this line:

    When I sang a song about a Honky Tonk
    It was time to leave
  • "Honky Tonk Women" was used as the title for a session of the amime series Cowboy Bebop. Along with other classic rock songs, this was used to introduce the "Femme Fatale" character. >>
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