Breaking: The Rolling Stone Star Mick Jagger has officially announced Retirement due to Serious health challenge…

Over the course of their six-decade-long career, The Rolling Stones have written some of the most iconic rock tunes of all time, from the toe-tapping ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’, to the endless “ooh”s of ‘Sympathy for the Devil’. But long before Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’ songwriting partnership made them one of the most well-known and well-respected duos in music history, the band found their start playing covers of songs penned by other people.

The Stones unleashed their debut single in the summer of 1963, a rendition of Chuck Berry’s rock and roller ‘Come On’. This first release set the tone for their early years, which would be dominated by covers. From Buddy Holly to Bobby Womack, they spent the first half of the 1960s mastering the art of the cover, releasing full albums of songs penned by other writers.

However, a career based on covers couldn’t last for 60 years, so the Stones had to try their hand at songwriting. By the decade’s mid-point, they were peppering in songs penned by the Jagger-Richards duo, from ‘Heart of Stone’ to ‘As Tears Go By’. And then, in 1966, they took the plunge and released their first album made up of entirely new material, Aftermath.

The record featured ambitious efforts like ‘Goin’ Home’ and the iconic ‘Paint It Black’. The floodgates had been opened, and the Stones were well on the way to becoming the biggest rock and roll band of all time. In the years that followed, they put out the sultry ‘Ruby Tuesday’, the iconic ‘Brown Sugar’ and the rocking ‘Start Me Up’.

Although the Stones had taken a new, more original direction, their love for covers remained. They still found their way onto their records, such as 1969’s Let It Bleed, which featured one of the finest covers in their discography – a take on Robert Johnson’s ‘Love In Vain’. Proving that their growing penchant for original songwriting hadn’t negated their talent for covers, they made the song completely their own.

Released in 1939, ‘Love In Vain’ was originally a short blues track. The Stones stretched it out over four minutes while infusing it with a new country-style edge. “I started searching around for a different way to present it,” Keith Richards recalled, as quoted by Songfacts, “Because if we were going to record it there was no point in trying to copy the Robert Johnson style or ways and styles.” The band added new chords to make it “more country”, as Jagger explained.

“And that’s another strange song, because it’s very poignant,” Jagger added, “Robert Johnson was a wonderful lyric writer, and his songs are quite often about love, but they’re desolate.” ‘Love In Vain’ is certainly a fine example of his talent for bleakly romantic songwriting. “Well, the train come in the station, and I looked her in the eye,” he sings, “Woah, I felt so sad, so lonesome, that I could not help but cry.”

The song echoes this feeling throughout, singing of love in vain, steeped in sorrow and genuine emotion. The Stones only served this feeling with their cover, deepening the dramatics of Johnson’s lyrics with country twangs and Jagger’s vocals. It reasserted the Stones as cover connoisseurs and reinvented the blues song for a new audience. As such, it’s one of the finest covers in their catalogue.