Fact #161433

Mick Jagger (vocalist, Rolling Stones) : It's about a man after an accident, really. It's not about being addicted to morphine so much as that. Ry Cooder plays wonderfully on that.

Ry Cooder : The only thing I knew about them, was that they'd done a bad version of It's All Over Now by Bobby Womack and The Valentinos. I never could understand why they did that.
(Source : interview by Mick Brown in the Sunday Times, May 1982)

Keith Richards : He came over with Jack Nitzsche, and we said, 'Do you want to come along and play?' The first thing Mick wanted was to re-cut Sister Morphine with The Stones, which is what we got together. He's also playing mandolin on Love In Vain or ... he's on another track too. He played beautifully, man.

Ry Cooder : There wasn't much to it really. I went down there, it was in London, and I played in the studio with them. I had nothing else to do and nothing much was going on. We all sat around and played and it isn't very good music so for me it was kind of like … pretty dull. But then, on the other hand, six months later I got a big fat cheque for royalties. I said, 'Ohhh! That changes the picture a little bit.' So I was very grateful. At the time I was poor.
(Source : interview with Jan Sneum in Swing 51, No5, circa 1982)

Ry Cooder : Keith Richards didn't like me. Like, he left the room when I walked in. But I tried to be invisible and just blend in.
(Source : interview by Ben Fong-Torres, Rolling Stone, October 29, 1970)

Keith Richards : For a time we thought the songs that were on that first album by Robert Johnson were the only recordings he had made, and then suddenly around '67 or '68 up comes this second (bootleg) collection that included Love in Vain. Love in Vain was such a beautiful song. Mick and I both loved it, and at the time I was working and playing around with Gram Parsons, and I started searching around for a different way to present it, because if we were going to record it there was no point in trying to copy the Robert Johnson style or ways and styles. We took it a little bit more country, a little bit more formalized, and Mick felt comfortable with that.

Bill Wyman : Sister Morphine is another (I used my first bass guitar on) - a lot of the slow, bluesy things, the ballady things, songs where I wanted it to sound like a string bass. I can sort of slide on it because there are no frets, and I can almost get a little bit of that slap sound playing it with the thumb. I play every other bass with a pick, but I use my thumb on that one.
(Source : interview in 1978)