“Ruby Tuesday” by The Rolling Stones

"Ruby Tuesday" hit the shops in January 1967, sharing a double A-side with "Let's Spend the Night Together", and it showed the Rolling Stones could break your heart as easily as kick your door in. They cut it around November 1966 at Olympic Studios during the Between the Buttons sessions, with Andrew Loog Oldham producing, and it's all baroque delicacy: Brian Jones weaves a countermelody on alto recorder, while Bill Wyman fingers a double bass that Keith Richards bows.

The credit reads Jagger and Richards, but Richards said the song is about Linda Keith, his girlfriend in the mid-'60s, and Jagger later admitted the melody and the words weren't his, though he always loves singing it. It gave the Stones their fourth US number one and reached number three in the UK, and it landed on the American edition of Between the Buttons.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.