You Gotta Move

Composer: Fred McDowell         Original performer: Mississippi Fred McDowell (1964)
Recording date: December 1969 & March-May 1970
Recording locations: Muscle Shoals Sound Studios, Florence, Alabama, USA & Olympic Sound Studios, London, England
Producer: Jimmy Miller        Chief engineers: Jimmy Johnson, Glyn Johns & Andy Johns
Performed onstage: 1969-70, 1975-76, 2015

Line-up:

Drums: Charlie Watts
Slide acoustic guitar: Keith Richards
Rhythm electric guitar: Keith Richards
Lead electric guitar: Mick Taylor
Lead vocal: Mick Jagger
Background vocals: Mick Jagger & Keith Richards
Electric piano: Bill Wyman
 

You got to move, you got to move
You got to move, child, you got to move
Oh when the Lord get ready, you got to move

You may be high, you may be low
You may be rich, child, you may be poor
But when the Lord get ready, you got to move
 
You see that woman who walks the streets
You see that police upon his beat
But when the Lord get ready, you got to move
 
You got to move
 
 

TrackTalk

You Gotta Move was this great Mississippi Fred McDowell song that we used to play all the time in the studio. I used a slide on that - on an old 1954 Fender Telecaster - and that was the beginning of that slide thing I tried to develop with the Stones.
- Mick Taylor, 2011

We use to mess around doing it in rehearsals or in a hotel room or something like that and we decided to record it. Mick Taylor plays this crying slide guitar on it and Charlie plays this very strange drum pattern. Keith plays a 12-string, which he doesn't do very much. This sort of stuf is very hard to recreate. Fred McDowell's version is full of emotion. But I think we managed to pull it off on this occasion. I wouldn't say that every occasion (laughs). You make it your own. All the lines are very similar to Fred McDowell's lines but we put something else into it. We used to do it quite a lot onstage.
- Mick Jagger, 2015

I very rarely play slide on records. There's always a better slide player in the band than me. I did use slide on things, mostly on acoustic stuff like You Gotta Move and Prodigal Son, stuff like that, open-D or open-E.
- Keith Richards, 1989

For the slide part of You Gotta Move I used a Fender Telecaster... (Keith played) a National guitar.
- Mick Taylor, 1979


Back to TrackTalk Menu.

Back to Sticky Fingers.

Back to Main Page.