Keith Richards is one of rock’s most legendary guitarists, but if you’re reading Gus & Me with your kids, the version of Keith you’re meeting is a wide‑eyed little boy following his granddad through London streets, not the guy dodging hotel furniture on tour with the Rolling Stones.
Born in 1943 in Dartford, Kent, England, Richards grew up in a modest postwar household where music was the family’s everyday magic trick. His mother, Doris, filled the house with jazz and blues records, while his maternal grandfather, Theodore Augustus “Gus” Dupree, was the real live musician in the family, a former big‑band player who saw something in the quiet boy trailing behind him. In his memoir Life, Richards writes about how Gus encouraged him to pick up a guitar, nudging him from listening to actually playing. That small push from a grandparent became the beginning of one of the most influential guitar careers in modern music.
As a teenager, Richards was more interested in riffs than rules and was eventually expelled from Dartford Technical School for truancy, drifting instead toward art school and friends who loved American blues as much as he did. A chance reunion with his childhood schoolmate Mick Jagger on a train platform in 1961 restarted an old friendship based on shared record collections and dreams bigger than their small town.
