Classic British rock-n’-roll required three elements: a guitar, preferably electric; a player, typically a self-fashioned vagabond, outcast, or rebel; and at least a lingering lick of British Romanticism. Music critics call the electric guitar “the most privileged instrument in rock music” and “the primary symbol of rock culture” with a “rarefied place” in rock.[i] The term “guitar gods” testifies to rock’s enduring “cult of the guitarist.”[ii] In 1950, Mississippi-born blues musician Muddy Waters (1913-83) recorded the lyrics that would come to define this cult’s hero:

Well my mother told my father
Just before I was born
Well, I got a boy child comin’
He’s gonna be a rollin’ stone. (listen here)

Waters depicts himself as a wanderer or itinerant musician, fatefully alienated from society. In homage to this archetype, in 1962, the British band the Blues Boys renamed themselves The Rolling Stones. In Britain, the Rolling Stones had deliberately fused British Romanticism to rock iconicity.[iii] In July 1969, their sometime guitarist Brian Jones drowned in his swimming pool. At a concert in Hyde Park, bandmate Mick Jagger eulogized Jones by reading from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Adonais (1821). (Hear Jagger read "Adonais" here.) As Janneke van der Leest argues, Jagger chose this reading because “the entire rock and pop culture of the early 1960s” in Britain “clearly express[es] the legacy of the Romantic movement.”[iv] The two Rock and Romanticism collections preceding this one document the relationship between these two movements, as does a mass media rock criticism. Goals identical to those of major British Romantic poets inform the Rolling Stones’s “attempt to expand the boundaries of conventional subject matter portrayed in verse” and rock guitar’s striving for “mass resistance” and “authentic, artistic expression.”[v]

The Rolling Stones play "Sympathy with the Devil." Hyde Park, July 1969.

[i] Kearney, Mary Celeste. Gender and Rock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 139-40.

[ii] Weinstein, Deena. “Rock’s Guitar Gods—Avatars of the Sixties.” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 70, no. 2 (2013): 139-154, p. 139; Gavin Carfoot, “Electric and Virtual Noise: The Cultural Identity of the Guitar,” Leonardo Music Journal 16 (2006): 35-39, p. 36.

[iii] Harrington, Joe S. Sonic Cool: The Life and Death of Rock’n’Roll (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 2002), 125.

[iv] Van der Leest, Janneke. “Romanticism in the Park: Mick Jagger Reading Shelley,” in Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2, edited by James Rovira (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015), 19-34, 19.

[v] Frank Hoffman, The Literature of Rock, 1954-1978 (London: Scarecrow Press, 1981), 79, summarizes Richard Merton, “Comment on Chester’s ‘For a Rock Aesthetic’,” in The Age of Rock: Sounds of the American Cultural Revolution, edited by Jonathan Eisen (New York: Vintage, 1969), 109-117; Carfoot, “Electric and Virtual Noise,” 36.