The story behind The Rolling Stones’ Angela Davis song
Updated 10:11 AM; Posted Feb 12, 9:12 PM
By Matt Wake |
[email protected]“We had never met her, but we admired her from afar,” Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards said of Angela Davis, talking to Harper’s Bazaar writer Brooke Mazurek in 2017.
Richards and Stones singer Mick Jagger wrote the band's 1972 song "Sweet Black Angel" about Davis, the Birmingham native and controversial civil rights activist.
It's a standout track on one of rock's greatest albums, The Stones' 1972 double-LP "Exile on Main St."
A mix of blues, folk and world-music, “Sweet Black Angel” is a rare snuggly tune on the otherwise piratically plastered “Exile.”
“This one started as an island-lilt sort of thing when we were in Jamaica," Richards told Harper’s. “After a while the words ‘Sweet Black Angel’ crept into it, and I realized Mick was writing about Angela Davis, the famous activist who was under arrest at the time.”
In 1970, Davis, a former UCLA philosophy instructor previously terminated (under orders from California’s then-governor Ronald Reagan) for being communist, now faced murder, kidnapping and criminal conspiracy charges. Guns she’d purchased were used in a deadly failed courtroom attempt to free three inmates known as the Soledad Brothers, accused of murdering a prison guard. Her spectacularly Afroed visage graced the FBI’s most-wanted list. Davis went on the lam. After about two months, she was apprehended in a $30-per-day, seventh floor Howard Johnson Motor Lodge room in midtown Manhattan. U.S. President Richard Nixon called Davis a “dangerous terrorist.” But she hadn’t been there at that attempt to spring the Soledad Brothers, and witnesses later testified Davis purchased the firearms in question for guarding the inmates’ defense headquarters, according to New York Times reporter Jennifer Schuessler. After being held in prison 16 months, Davis was finally granted bail. She stood trial in Santa Clara County, Calif., where an all-white jury acquitted her of all charges.