I mentioned yesterday that the Rolling Stones were fed by American music - rock and roll, r&b and the blues - and that they returned the favour by breathing life into each of them. (In fact a strong case could be made that American music was treated with more reverence and scholarship by English bands in the sixties than by their American counterparts.) But I didn't mention the relationship that the Stones had with country music, and how many of their greatest songs were from the genre. And it's not a coincidence that their classic period - from 1968 to 1972, when they released four straight masterpieces (Beggars' Banquet, Let it Bleed, Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main Street) - was also the time during which they were most involved with country, both in terms of composition and the integration of its rhythms and sounds into their rock and roll. Consider this list: "Factory Girl", "Salt of the Earth", "Dear Doctor", "Country Honk", "You Got the Silver", "Dead Flowers", "Wild Horses", "Sweet Virginia", "Torn and Frayed". And then there's my favourite Stones country song, "Faraway Eyes" from 1978's Some Girls, with its beautifully sung chorus, its unforgettable truck-driving narrator and his girl with "well, you know what kinda eyes she got": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDnZBvCetQM